Justice in War Time/The Ethics of War
THE ETHICS OF WAR.[1]
The question whether war is ever justified, and if so under what circumstances, is one which has been forcing itself upon the attention of all thoughtful men. It seems to me that no single one of the combatants is justified in the present war, and yet I cannot believe that war is under all circumstances a crime. Opinions on such a subject as war are the outcome of feeling rather than of thought: given a man's emotional temperament, his convictions, both on war in general and on any particular war which may occur during his lifetime can be predicted with tolerable certainty. The arguments used will merely reinforce what comes out of a man's nature. The fundamental facts in this as in all ethical questions are feelings; all that thought can do is to clarify and harmonise the expression of those feelings, and it is such clarifying and harmonising of my own feelings that I wish to attempt in the present article.
I.
The question of the rights and wrongs of a particular war is generally considered from a juridical or quasijuridical standpoint: A certain country broke a certain treaty, crossed a certain frontier, committed certain technically unfriendly acts, and, therefore, by the rules, it is permissible to kill as many of the soldiers of that country as modern armaments render possible. There is a certain unreality, a certain lack of imaginative grasp about this way of viewing matters. It has the advantage, always dearly prized by lazy men, of substituting a formula, at once ambiguous and easily applied, for the vital realisation of the consequences of acts. The judicial point of view is properly applicable to the relations of individuals within a State, but not, as yet, to the relations between States. Within a State, private war is forbidden, and the disputes of private citizens are settled, not by their own force, but by the force of the police, which, being overwhelming, very seldom needs to be explicity displayed. There have to be rules according to which the police decide who is to be considered in the right in a private dispute, and these rules constitute law. The chief gain derived from the law and the police is the abolition of private wars, and this gain is secured even if the law as it stands is not the best possible. It is therefore in the public interest that the man who goes against the law should be considered in the wrong, not because of the excellence of the law, but because of the importance of preventing individuals within the State from resorting to force.
In the interrelations of States nothing of the same sort exists. There is, it is true, a body of conventions called "international law," and there are innumerable treaties between High Contracting Powers. But the conventions and the treaties differ from anything that could properly be called law by the absence of sanction: there is no police force able or willing to enforce their observance. It follows from this that every nation concludes multitudes of divergent and incompatible treaties, and that, in spite of the high language one sometimes hears, the main purpose of the treaties is in actual fact to afford the sort of pretext which is considered respectable for engaging in war with another Power. A Great Power is considered unscrupulous when it goes to war without previously providing itself with such a pretext—unless, indeed, its opponent is a small country, in which case it is only to be blamed if that small country happens to be under the protection of some other Great Power. England and Russia may partition Persia immediately after guaranteeing its integrity and independence, because no other Great Power has a recognised interest in Persia, and Persia is one of those small States in regard to which treaty obligations are not considered binding. France and Spain, under a similar guarantee to Morocco, must not partition it without first compensating Germany, because it is recognised that, until such compensation has been offered and accepted, Germany, though not Morocco, has a legitimate interest in the preservation of that country. All Great Powers having guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium, England has a recognised right to resent its violation—a right which is exercised when it is believed to be to England's interest, and waived when England's interest is not thought to be involved. A treaty is therefore not to be regarded as a contract having the same kind of binding force as belongs to private contracts; it is to be regarded only as a means of giving notice to rival Powers that certain acts may, if the national interest so demand, form one of those reasons for war which are recognised as legitimate. If the faithful observance of treaties were a frequent occurrence, like the observance of contracts, the breach of a treaty might be a real and not merely a formal ground for war, since it would tend to weaken the practice of deciding disputes by agreement rather than by armed force. In the absence of such a practice, however, appeal to treaties is only to be regarded as part of the diplomatic machinery. A nation whose diplomacy has been skilfully conducted will always be able to find some treaty or agreement bringing its intervention within the rules of the diplomatic game when it believes that its interests demand war. But so long as treaties are only observed when it is convenient to do so, the rules of the diplomatic game have nothing to do with the question whether embarking or participating in a war will or will not be for the good of mankind, and it is this question which has to be decided in considering whether a war is justified or not.
II.
It is necessary, in regard to any war, to consider not its paper justification in past agreements, but its real justification in the balance of good which it is to bring to mankind. At the beginning of a war each nation, under the influence of what is called patriotism, believes that its own victory is both certain and of great importance to mankind. The praiseworthiness of this belief has become an accepted maxim: even when war is actually in progress it is held to be natural and right that a citizen of an enemy country should regard the victory of his side as assured and highly desirable. By concentrating attention upon the supposed advantages of the victory of our own side, we become more or less blind to the evils inseparable from war and equally certain whichever side may ultimately prove victorious. Yet so long as these are not fully realised, it is impossible to judge justly whether a war is or is not likely to be beneficial to the human race. Although the theme is trite, it is necessary briefly to remind ourselves what the evils of war really are.
To begin with the most obvious evil: large numbers of young men, the most courageous and the most physically fit in their respective nations, are killed, bringing great sorrow to their friends, loss to the community, and gain only to themselves, since they escape the horror of existence in this world of strife. Many others are maimed for life, some go mad, and others become nervous wrecks, mere useless and helpless derelicts. Of those who survive many will be brutalised and morally degraded by the fierce business of killing, which, however much it may be the soldier's duty, must shock and often destroy the most humane instincts. As every truthful record of war shows, fear and hate let loose the wild beast in a certain proportion of combatants, leading to strange cruelties, which must be faced, but not dwelt upon if sanity is to be preserved.
Of the evils of war to the non-combatant population in the regions where fighting occurs, the recent misfortunes of Belgium have afforded an example upon which it is not necessary to enlarge. It is necessary, however, to combat the common belief of English people that the misfortunes of Belgium afford a reason in favour of war. By a tragic delusion, hatred perpetuates the evils from which it springs. The sufferings of Belgium are attributed to the Germans, not to war, and thus the very horrors of the war are used to make men desire to increase their area and intensity. Even assuming the utmost possible humanity in the conduct of military operations, it cannot be doubted that if the troops of the Allies penetrate into the industrial regions of Germany, the German population will have to suffer a great part of the misfortunes which Germany has inflicted upon Belgium. To men under the influence of hate this thought is a cause of rejoicing, but to men in whom humane feeling is not extinct it shows that our sympathy with Belgium should make us hate war rather than Germany.
The evils which war produces outside the area of military operations are perhaps even more serious, for, though less intense, they are far more widespread. Passing by the anxiety and sorrow of those whose sons or husbands or brothers are at the front, the extent and consequences of the economic injury inflicted by war are much greater than is usually realised. It is common to speak of economic progress as grovelling and uninspired. This view is perhaps natural in well-to-do people, to whom economic progress means setting up a motor car or taking holidays abroad instead of at the seaside. But with regard to the poorer classes of society, economic progress is the first condition of many spiritual goods, and even often of life itself. An overcrowded family, living in a slum in conditions of filth and immorality, where half the children die from ignorance of hygiene and bad sanitation, and the remainder grow up stunted and ignorant—such a family can hardly make progress mentally or spiritually, except through an improvement in its economic condition. And without going to the very bottom of the social scale, economic progress is necessary for a good education, for a tolerable existence for women, and for that breadth and freedom of outlook upon which any solid and national advance must be based. It is not the most oppressed or the most ill-used who make an effective plea for social justice, for some reorganization of society which shall give less to the idler and more to the common man. Throughout the Napoleonic wars, while the landowners of England continually increased their rent-rolls, the mass of the wage-earning population sank into greater and greater destitution. It was only afterwards, during the long peace, that a less unjust distribution began to be possible. It cannot be doubted that the desire on the part of the rich to distract men's minds from the claims of social justice has been more or less unconsciously one of the motives leading to war in modern Europe. Everywhere the well-to-do, and the political parties which represent their interests, have been the chief agents in stirring up international hatred and in persuading the working man that his real enemy is the foreigner. Thus war, and the fear of war, has a double effect in retarding social progress: it diminishes the resources available for improving the condition of the wage-earning classes, and it distracts men's minds from the need and possibility of general improvement by persuading them that the way to better themselves is to injure their comrades in some other country. It is as a protest against this delusion that international Socialism has arisen; and whatever may be the thought of Socialism as an economic doctine, its internationalism makes it the sanest force in modern politics, and the only large body which has preserved some degrees of judgment and humanity in the present chaos.
But of all the evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict, where, if the nations could once overcome the blindness of inherited instincts and the sinister influence of anti-social interests, such as those of armaments with their subservient press, it would be seen that there is a real consonance of interest and essential identity of human nature, and every reason to replace hatred by love. Mr. Norman Angell has well shown how unreal, as applied to the conflicts of civilised States, is the whole vocabulary of international conflict, how illusory are the gains supposed to be obtained by victory, and how fallacious are the injuries which nations, in times of peace, are supposed to inflict upon each other in economic competition. The importance of this thesis lies not so much in its direct economic application as in the hope which it affords for the liberation of better spiritual impulses in the relations of different communities. To love our enemies, however desirable, is not easy, and therefore, it is well to realise that the enmity springs only from blindness, not from any inexorable physical necessity.
III.
Are there any wars which achieve so much for the good of mankind as to outweigh all the evils we have been considering? I think there have been such wars in the past, but they are not wars of the sort with which our diplomatists are concerned, for which our armies and navies have been prepared, and which are exemplified by the present conflict. For purposes of classification we may roughly distinguish four kinds of wars, though, of course, in any given case a war is not likely to be quite clearly of any one of the four kind. With this proviso we may distinguish: (1) Wars of Colonisation; (2) Wars of Principle; (3) Wars of Self-Defence; (4) Wars of Prestige: Of these four kinds I should say that the first and second are fairly often justified; the third seldom, except as against an adversary of inferior civilisation; and the fourth, which is the sort to which the present war belongs, never. Let us consider these four kinds of war in succession.
By a "war of colonisation" I mean a war whose purpose is to drive out the whole population of some territory and replace it by an invading population of a different race. Ancient wars were very largely of this kind, of which we have a good example in the Book of Joshua. In modern times the conflicts of Europeans with American Indians, Maoris, and other aborigines in temperate regions, have been of this kind. Such wars are totally devoid of technical justification, and are apt to be more ruthless than any other war. Nevertheless, if we are to judge by results, we cannot regret that such wars have taken place. They have the merit, often quite fallaciously claimed for all wars, of leading in the main to the survival of the fittest, and it is chiefly through such wars that the civilised portion of the world has been extended from the neighbourhood of the Mediterranean to the greater part of the earth's surface. The eighteenth century, which liked to praise the virtues of the savage and contrast them with the gilded corruption of courts, nevertheless had no scruple in thrusting the noble savage out from his North-American hunting grounds. And we cannot at this date bring ourselves to condemn the process by which the American continent has been acquired for European civilisation. In order that such wars may be justified, it is necessary that there should be a very great and undeniable difference between the civilisation of the colonisers and that of the dispossessed natives. It is necessary, also, that the climate should be one in which the invading race can flourish. When these conditions are satisfied the conquest becomes justified, though actual fighting against the dispossessed inhabitants ought, of course, to be avoided as far as is compatible with colonising. Many humane people will object in theory to the justification of this form of robbery, but I do not think that any practical or effective objection is likely to be made.
Such wars, however, belong now to the past. The regions where the white man live are all allotted, either to white races or to yellow races to whom the white man is not clearly superior, and whom, in any case, he is not strong enough to expel. Apart from small punitive expeditions, wars of colonisation, in the true sense, are no longer possible. What are nowadays called colonial wars do not aim at the complete occupation of a country by a conquering race; they aim only at securing certain governmental and trading advantages. They belong, in fact, rather with what I call wars of prestige than with wars of colonisation in the old sense. There are, it is true, a few rare exceptions. The Greeks in the second Balkan war conducted a war of colonisation against the Bulgarians; throughout a certain territory which they intended to occupy they killed all the men, and carried off all the women. But in such cases the only possible justification fails, since there is no evidence of superior civilisation on the side of the conquerors.
In spite of the fact that wars of colonisation belong to the past, men's feelings and beliefs about war are still those appropriate to the extinct conditions which rendered such wars possible. When the present war began, many people in England imagined that if the Allies were victorious Germany would cease to exist: Germany was to be "destroyed" or "smashed," and since these phrases sounded vigorous and cheering, people failed to see that they were totally devoid of meaning. There are some seventy million Germans; with great good fortune we might, in a successful war, succeed in killing two millions of them. There would then still be sixty-eight million Germans, and in a few years the loss of the population due to the war would be made good. Germany is not merely a State, but a nation, bound together by a common language, common traditions, and common ideals. Whatever the outcome of the war, this nation will still exist at the end of it, and its strength cannot be permanently impaired. But imagination in what pertains to war is still dominated by Homer and the Old Testament; men who cannot see that circumstances have changed since those works were composed are called "practical" men, and are said to be free from illusions, while those who have some understanding of the modern world, and some capacity for freeing their minds from the influence of phrases, are called dreamy idealists, Utopians, traitors, and friends of every country but their own. If the facts were understood, wars amongst civilised nations would cease owing to their inherent absurdity. Men's passions always lag behind their political organisation, and facts which leave no outlet for passions are not readily admitted. In order that hatred, pride, and violence may find an outlet, men unconsciously blind themselves to the plainest facts of politics and economics, and modern war continues to be waged with the phrases and theories invented by simpler men in a simpler age.
IV.
The second type of war which may sometimes be justified is what may be called "the war of principle." To this kind belong the wars of Protestant and Catholic, and the English and American civil wars. In such cases, each side, or at least one side, is honestly convinced that the progress of mankind depends upon the adoption of certain beliefs or institutions, which, through blindness or natural depravity, the other side will not regard as reasonable, except when presented at the point of the bayonet. Such wars may be justified; for example, a nation practising religious toleration may be justified in resisting a persecuting nation holding a different creed. On this ground we might justify the resistance of the Dutch to the English and French combined in the time of Charles II. But wars of principle are much less often justified than is believed by those in whose age they occur. It is very seldom that a principle of genuine value to mankind can only be propagated by military force: as a rule, it is the bad part of men's principles, not the good part, which makes it necessary to fight for their defence. And for this reason the bad part rather than the good rises to prominence during the progress of the war of principle. A nation undertaking a war in defence of religious toleration would be almost certain to persecute those of its citizens who did not believe in religious toleration. A war on behalf of democracy, if it is long and fierce, is sure to end in the exclusion from all share of power of those who do not support the war. Mr. George Trevelyan in an eloquent passage describes the defeat which, as the ultimate outcome of our civil war, overtook alike the ideals of the Roundheads and the ideals of the Cavaliers. "And this was the curse of the victors, not to die, but to live, and almost to lose their awful faith in God, when they saw the Restoration, not of the old gaiety that was too gay for them, and of the old loyalty that was too loyal for them, but of corruption and selfishness that had neither country nor king. The sound of the Roundhead cannon has long ago died away, but still the silence of the garden is heavy with unalterable fate, brooding over besiegers and besieged, in such haste to destroy each other and permit only the vile to survive."[2] This common doom of opposite ideals is the usual, though not the invariable, penalty of supporting ideals by force. While it may therefore be conceded that such wars are not invariably to be condemned, we must, nevertheless, scrutinise very sceptically the claim of any particular war to be justified on the ground of the victory which it brings to some important principle. There are some who maintain that the present war is a war in defence of democracy. I do not know whether this view is adopted by the Tsar, and for the sake of the stability of the Alliance I sincerely hope that it is not. I do not, however, desire to dispute the proposition that democracy in the western nations would suffer from the victory of Germany. What I do wish to dispute is the belief not infrequently entertained in England that if the Allies are victorious democracy can be forced upon a reluctant Germany as part of the conditions of peace. Men who think thus have lost sight of the spirit of democracy in worship of the letter. The Germans have the form of government which they desire, and any other form, imposed by alien victors, would be less in harmony with the spirit of democracy, however much it might conform to the letter. Men do right to desire strongly the victory of ideals which they believe to be important, but it is almost always a sign of yielding to undue impatience when they believe that what is valuable in their ideals can be furthered by substituting force for peaceful persuasion. To advocate democracy by war is only to repeat, on a vaster scale and with far more tragic results, the error of those who have sought it hitherto by the assassin's knife and the bomb of the anarchist.
V.
VI.
The last kind of war we have to consider is what I have called "the war of prestige." Prestige is seldom more than one element in the causes of a war, but it is often a very important element. In the present war, until the war had actually broken out, it was almost the only thing involved, although as soon as the war began other and much more important matters came to be at stake. The initial question between Austria and Russia was almost wholly one of prestige. The lives of Balkan peasants could not have been much affected for good or evil by the participation or non-participation of Austrian officials in the trial of supposed Servian accomplices in the Sarajevo murders. This important question, which is the one on which the war is being fought, concerns what is called the hegemony of the Balkans, and this is entirely a question of prestige. Men desire the sense of triumph, and fear the sense of humiliation which they would have in yielding to the demands of another nation. Rather than forego the triumph, rather than endure the humiliation, they are willing to inflict upon the world all those disasters which it is now suffering and all that exhaustion and impoverishment which it must long continue to suffer. The willingness to inflict and endure such evils is almost universally praised: it is called high-spirited, worthy of a great nation, showing fidelity to ancestral traditions. The slightest sign of reasonableness is attributed to fear, and received with shame on the one side and with derision on the other. In private life exactly the same state of opinion existed so long as duelling was practised, and exist still in those countries in which this custom still survives. It is now recognised, at any rate in the Anglo-Saxon world, that the so-called “honour” which made duelling appear inevitable was a folly and a delusion. It is perhaps not too much to hope that the day may come when the honour of nations, like that of individuals, will be no longer measured by their willingness to inflict slaughter. It can hardly be hoped, however, that such a change will be brought about while the affairs of nations are left in the keeping of diplomats whose status is bound up with the diplomatic or military triumph of the countries from which they come, and whose manner of life renders them unusually ignorant of all political and economic facts of real importance and of all the changes of opinion and organisation which make the present world different from that of the eighteenth century. If any real progress is to be made in introducing sanity into international relations, these relations must henceforth be in the hands of men less aloof and less aristocratic, more in touch with common life, and more emancipated from the prejudices of a by-gone age. And popular education, instead of inflaming the hatred of foreigners and representing even the tiniest triumph as worthy of even the greatest sacrifices, must learn to aim rather at producing some sense of the solidarity of mankind and of the paltryness of those objects to which diplomatists, often secretly, think fit to pledge the manhood and heroism of nations.
The objects for which men have fought in the past, whether just or unjust, are no longer to be achieved by wars amongst civilised nations. A great weight of tradition, of financial interests, of political insincerity, is bound up with the anachronism of war. But it is perhaps not chimerical to hope that the present war, which has shocked the conscience of mankind more than any war in previous history, may produce a revulsion against antiquated methods, and may lead the exhausted nations to insist upon that brotherhood and co-operation which their rulers have hitherto denied them. There is no reason whatever against the settlement of all disputes by a Council of the Powers deliberating in public. Nothing stands in its way except the pride of rulers who wish to remain uncontrolled by anything higher than their own will. When this great tragedy has worked itself out to its disastrous conclusion, when the passions of hate and self-assertion have given place to compassion with the universal misery, the nations will perhaps realise that they have fought in blindness and delusion, and that the way of mercy is the way of happiness for all.