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A League of Nations
ANCIENT tradition believed in a golden age of mankind which lay in the splendid infancy of a primeval past; it looked back to some type or symbol of original perfection, Saturnian epoch, Satya Yuga, an age of sincere being and free unity when the sons of heaven were leaders of the human life and mind and the law of God was written, not in ineffective books, but on the tablets of man’s heart. Then he needed no violence of outer law or government to restrain him from evil or to cut and force his free being into the machine- made Procrustean mould of a social ideal; for a natural divine rule in his members was the spontaneous and sufficient safeguard of his liberty. This tradition was once so universal that one might almost be tempted to see in it the race memory of some golden and splendid realisation, not perhaps a miraculous divine beginning, but some past spiral cusp and apex, some topmost gloriously mounting arc of the cycles, – if there were not the equal chance of its being no more than a heightened example of that very common ideally retrospective tendency in the human mind which glorifies the past out of all perspective or proportion, blots out its shadows and sees it in some haze or deceiving light against the dark immediate shadow of the present, - or else a projection from his sense of the something divine, pure and perfect within him from which he has fallen, placed by symbolic legend not in the eternal but in time, not inwardly in his spiritual being, but outwardly in his obscure existence on this crude and transient crust of Earth. What concerns us more is that we find often associated with this memory or this backward-looking illusion, a vague hope far or near, or even a more precise prophetic or religious forward- looking tradition of a coming back to us of that golden perfection, Astraea redux, Saturnia regna, -let us say, a return from the falling line of the cycle to another similar, perhaps even greater high-glowing cusp and apex. Thus in the human mind Page-608 which looks always before and after, its great dream of the ideal past completed itself by a greater dream of the ideal future. These things modern man with his scientific and secularised mentality finds it difficult to believe in unless he has first theosophised or mysticised himself into a fine freedom from the positive scientific intelligence. Science which traces so confidently the nobly complete and astonishing evolution of our race in a fairly swift straight line from the ape man to the dazzlingly unfixable brilliancy of Mr. Lloyd George and the dyspeptic greatness of Rockefeller, rejects the old traditions as dreams and poetic figments. But to recompense us for our loss it has given us instead a more practicable, persistent and immediate vision of modern progress and the future hope of a rational and mechanically perfectible society: that is the one real religion sti111eft, the new Jerusalem of the modem creed of a positivist sociology. The ideal past has lost its glamour, but a sober glamour of the future is brought near to us and takes on to the constructive human reason a closer hue of reality. The Asiatic mind is indeed still incurably prone to the older type of imagination which took and still takes so many inspiring forms, second coming of Christ, City of God, the Divine Family, advent of Messiah, Mahdi or Avatar, - but whatever the variety of the form, the essence is the same, a religious or spiritual idealisation of a possible future humanity. The European temperament – and we are all trying to become for the moment, superficially at least, white, brown, yellow or black Europeans,- demands something more familiarly terrestrial and tangible, a secular, social, political dream of evolving humanity, a perfected democracy, socialism, communism, anarchism. But whichever line we take and whether it be truth or illusion, the thing behind is the same and would seem to be a necessity of our human mind and will to action. We cannot do without some kind of futurist idealism. Something we must labour to build individually and collectively out of ourselves and our life, unless we would be content with the commonness and stumbling routine of a half-made and half-animal manhood, – a self-dethronement to which that which is greatest in us will never consent,- and man cannot build greatly whether in art or life, unless Page-609 he
can conceive an idea and form of perfection and, conceiving, believe in his
power to achieve it out of however rebellious and unductile a stuff of nature.
Deprive him of this faith in his power for perfection and you slay or maim his
greatest creative or self-creative faculty. In the absence then of any
immediate practicability of that higher and profounder dream of a spiritually
united and perfected humanity, the dream of social and political meliorism may
be accepted as the strongest available incentive to keep humanity going
forward. It is better that it should have the ideal of a saving machinery than
that it should have no ideal at all, no figure of a larger, better and sweeter
life. Page-610 future, or what means or opportunities the new order proposes to offer for its growth and satisfaction? But this is no doubt too esoteric a way of looking at things. The practical western mind does not trouble itself overmuch with these subtleties; it prefers, and rightly enough, since to get something. done seems to be the chief actual business of man in life, to hasten to the matter in hand and realise something useful, visible and tangible, good enough for a practical beginning or step forward. It believes besides in the omnipotence of law and institution to make the life of man conformable to his intellectual or spiritual ideals; it is satisfied if it can write down and find sanctions for a good and convenient system of laws, a compact or constitution, set up the mechanical means for the enforcement of its idea, build into effective form a workable institution. Other less palpable things, if they are at all indispensable, are expected to develop of themselves, as surely they ought under good mechanical conditions. Good philosophical as well as practical justification may be put forward for this attitude. Form, after all, is an effective suggestion to the soul; machinery, as even churches and religions have been prone to believe, is all-powerful and can be trusted to create whatever you may need of the spirit. God himself or contriving Nature had first to invent the machinery and form of a universe and could only then work out in its mould some figure of the spirit. Therefore, the sign of great hope, the good tidings of peace and good will unto men is not that a new and diviner or simply a more human spirit has been born into humanity, seized upon its leaders and extended itself among its ego-ridden, passion-driven, interest-governed millions, but that an institution has been begotten at Paris with the blessings of Premiers and Presidents, - the constitution of an inter- national society, supported by the armed force of great nations and empires and therefore sure to be practicable, prosper and succeed, has been got into shape which will make war, militarism, oppression, exploitation an ugly dream of the past, induce Capital and Labour, lion and lamb, to lie down side by side in peace and not, as a wicked Bolshevism proposes, one well digested inside the other, and in fact bring about before Page-611 long, sooner it is hoped rather than later, the grand fraternity of mankind. This is good news, if true. Still, before we enter the house of thanksgiving, let us pause a little and cast an eye of scrutiny on this new infant phenomenon. A just, generous, cordial and valid League of Nations is the thing which has been created, it seems to replace the old unjust Balances of Power and stumbling, quarrelsome Concerts. And if it is to succeed better than the loose, ineffective and easily dissoluble things which it supplants, it must satisfy, one would think, certain conditions which they did not even attempt to fulfil. And one would at first sight fix something like the following as the indispensable conditions. First, this League must draw into its circle in one way or another all the existing nations of the earth; and that it must do on both just and agreeable terms so that they may join willingly and gladly and without any serious misgivings, reservations or heart-burnings; it must satisfy each and all by a fair and effective and, one must add in these democratic days, an honourable and equal position in this new society of the peoples. Since it should command and retain their moral assent and support, if it is to maintain in being an otherwise insecure material adhesion, it must, in order to do that constantly, not only at the moment of formation but in the future, base itself on no self-regarding law or established table of institutions fixed by any arbitrary will of those who for the moment are the strongest but on some firm, recognisable and always evolvable principle of equity and justice, for only where these things are is there a moral guarantee and security. The constitution of the League must provide a trustworthy means for the solution of all difficult, delicate and embarrassing questions which may hereafter endanger the infant and precarious framework of international society, and for that purpose it must establish a permanent, a central and a strong authority which all nations can readily recognise and accept as a natural head and faithful dynamic expression of the corporate being of mankind. These, one would think, are not at all nebulous, fanciful or too idealistic demands, but the practical necessities of any system of yet loose unification such as now is contemplated, conditions it must from the first and increasingly Page-612 satisfy if it is to survive the enormous difficulties of an enterprise which, as it proceeds, will have to work out of being most’ of the natural egoistic instincts and rooted past habits of the international mentality of the race. This new gigantic bantling which has come into existence with War for its father and an armed and enforced Peace for its mother, with threatening and bloodily suppressed revolutions, a truncated internationalistic idealism and many half-curbed, just snaffled rearing national egoisms for its witnesses and god-parents, has not, when looked at from this standpoint, in spite of certain elements of promise, an altogether reassuring appearance. The circumstances of its inception were adverse and except by a tremendous effort of self-conquest in the minds of the rulers and statesmen of the victorious nations, a self- conquest rendered a thousand times more difficult by the stupendous magnitude and the intoxicating completeness of their victory, any at all complete result and auspicious new beginning could not be hoped for. This league now in the last throes of formation has not been a spontaneous creation of a peaceful, equal and well-combined will towards unity of all the world’s peoples. It comes into being overshadowed by the legacy of hatreds, reprisals, apprehensions, ambitions of a murderous world war chequered by revolutions which have opened a new and alarming vista of world-wide unrest and disturbance. It has grown out of a vague but strong aspiration, - more among the rank and file of the nations, and even so not equally common to all of them, than among their governing men or classes, – to find some means for the future avoidance of violent catastrophes in the international life of mankind. It has been precipitated into actual and immediate being by the determination of an eminent idealistic statesman with the modified and in some cases unwilling assent of others who shared only partially or not at all his idealism, one man of strong will who, aided by a commanding position given to him by circumstances and a flexible obstinacy in his use of them, has been able to impose some shadow or some first incomplete form of his ideal - the future alone can show which it is to be - on the crude course of events and the realistic egoism of Page-613 governments and imperial nations. But in present fact the large and complete ideal with which he began his ‘York, has been so impinged upon by the necessities of national passions, ambition, self-interest and by pressure of the force of circumstances, – still in spite of all idealism the chief determining factors of life, - that it is difficult to put one’s hand on any thing in the concrete arrangement formulated and say without doubt or qualm that here is the very embodiment of the high principles in whose name the great war was fought and won. This is not surprising, nor should it be disappointing except to those who trusted more to their hopes than to experience. All we have to see is whether those high original principles were indeed necessary to the future security and evolution of this new association of the peoples and, if so, what chance they have of emerging from the forms in which they now seem to have been rather buried than given a body. And that will depend on the extent to which the conditions already suggested are realised or evolvable from the League’s incipient constitution. An effective League of Nations must draw into itself all the existing nations of mankind; for any considerable omission or exclusion will bring in almost inevitably an element of future danger, of possible disagreements and collisions, perhaps of a rival grouping with jealousies which must lead to another and more colossal catastrophe. In its ostensible figure this new League does not by any means wear a catholic: appearance. Professedly, it is nothing but an association of actual friends and allies. In the front rank stand confident and masterful five great and powerful empires or nations, - the sole great Powers left standing by the hurricane in unimpaired strength, and two of them indeed with an enormously increased power, influence and dominion: behind crowd in dimly and ineffectively a number of smaller European and American peoples, those who were allied to them or otherwise on their side in the war, and one feeble and disjointed oriental leviathan; but all these seem to partake only with a passive assent or a subordinate co-operation, – and in fact with very much of the first and very little of the latter, - whether in the determining of the form of the League or in its control and government. And the Page-614 immediate professed object of the association is not to knit the world together in the beginnings of a well-conceived unity, – that could only have been done if all the peoples had taken a free and equal part in these deliberations, whereas in fact the whole thing has been hastily constructed in semi-secret conference by the victors of the war, and chiefly by the will of the five leading Powers. Its object is to regulate the interests and mutual relations of the members of the League by rule, agreement, deliberation and arbitration and their relations with other States -outside the League as much as may be by the same means; it is this only and in the beginning it is nothing more. But a door is left open for the nations still outside to enter in a given time, provided they subscribe unquestioningly to a system which they will have had no hand in framing, though under it they will have to live. On the other hand a door of egress is also provided for any nation wishing to recede hereafter from the League, and if disunion should set in among the greater Powers, this dangerous, though under the circumstances perhaps unavoidable provision, may easily lead to the automatic dissolution of even this hesitating first frame of a partial unity. But the facts and forces of the situation
are perhaps more favourable than ostensible paper provisions. The nations not
yet included are with two great and perilous exceptions small and
inconsiderable and their position outside will be so disadvantageous, they will
be at every turn so much at the mercy of this formidable combination,
- for the five
dominant Powers will easily be able, if they are determined and united, to
enforce their will vigorously against all dissidents, -
that they may
be expected to subscribe more or less readily to its terms or at any rate to
enter in after a few years’ experience of exclusion. The Great Powers too are
not likely to have strong reasons for breaking asunder for some years to come,
and time may perhaps, pro- vided no new revolutions sweep across the world,
confirm the habit of united action. We may assume that here we have in fact,
though not yet in name, the beginnings of a council or an imperfect federation
of the world’s peoples. Page-615 brought under it, have a still more baffling appearance. They do not at all correspond with the democratic idealism of the human mind of to-day but rather strike one as a structure of almost mediaeval irregularity, complexity, incoherent construction, a well-nigh feudal political building with some formal concessions on its ground floor to the modern canon of liberty and equality. A unification of mankind may proceed very much on the same lines as past unifications of smaller peoples into nations or empires. It might have been brought about by the military force or the political influence of some powerful king-state preponderant by land and sea, - pampotent par terre et mer, as Nostradamus prophetically described the British Empire, - not necessarily despotic and absolute but easily first among equals; and that I suppose is what would have happened if Germany had come up top dog in the struggle instead of a very much mutilated and flattened undermost. Nor is it at all certain that something of the sort will not eventually come about if the present attempt or crude sketch of a system should come to grief; but for the moment this contingency has been prevented or at least postponed. That possibility eliminated, the unification may still take the form of an oligarchy or hegemony of great Powers, leaders and masters of the herd, with the weaker rabble rest hanging on the flanks or posteriors of their mighty bellwethers and following them and their omnipotent decisions in sometimes a submissive and approbatory, sometimes a mutinous and discordant chorus; something very much of this kind is what this new League has certainly been in its formation and is likely to turn out in its execution. But there was also the vain present hope or dream, the strong future though far-off possibility of an equal, just and democratic federation of the peoples in which the dwarf and Goliath nations, the strong and the weak, the wealthy and the less wealthy, the immediately successful and the long or temporarily unfortunate, - who may yet have better gifts, have done really more for mankind than the arrivistes among the nations, - will have, as is the rule or the ideal in all democratic bodies, in law and in initial fact an equal position and there will be only a natural leadership and influence to differentiate by a freely accorded greater weight and voice. These were the three possibilities, Page-616 and they represent respectively the ideal of the past which is said to have been buried in the grave of imperial Germany, the fact of the present which is a fact only and to none an ideal, and the ideal of the future, loudly trumpeted during the war, though there is none now, except the vanquished, the subject and the revolutionary, so poor and weak as to do it reverence. The initial constitution of the League is
almost frankly oligarchic in its disposal of the international balance of
power, – not quite an absolute oligarchy, indeed, for there is certainly a
general assembly which is so far democratic that all its members will exult in
the dignifying possession of an equal vote. Honduras and Guatemala may, if the
fancy pleases them, indulge themselves in some feeling of being lifted up to an
equality with imperial England, America, the new arbiter of the world, and
victorious France. But this is an illusion, a trompe l’ ad!. For
we find that this general assembly is in no sense the governing body but only a
secondary authority, a court of approval and reference, to which the powerful
executive nations will refer, mostly at their own discretion, this or that
doubtful question for discussion. In practice and fact the new sovereign of the
world under this constitution, - jagadiSvaro
vii? - will be the executive body of League of Nations. But there the five great Powers will
sit in a secure and formidable permanence, while a changeable selection of
representatives picked out from the common herd will diminutively assist their
deliberations, assisting or discussing in the giant obscurity of their shadow.
One can easily see how the superior management of the world’s affairs will go
under these conditions and in fact have already had a taste of its quality in
the process of this formation and this building of a basis for what it is still hoped by many will be a long or
even a permanent peace. Evidently in such a governing body the Great Five will
deter- mine the whole policy and action; nothing will readily pass which will
be at all displeasing to these new masters of the earth, or let us say, to this
new composite hegemony, - for its
decisions will at no time be guided by that perilous,
ductile and variable thing, a majority, but must be by unanimity. What in
principle is this system but a novel, an improved, an enlarged and regularised
edition of the Concert of Powers, -
liberalised a little Page-617 in form because buttressed by a democratic general assembly which may, indeed, as circumstances develop and conditions change, become something, but may equally remain a dignified or undignified cypher, - but still in essence another and firmer Avatar of that old, loose and dubious body? Even something of that historic device, the balance of power, though now much changed, shifted, disjointed and perilously lopsided, still remains subtly concealed in this form of a novel order. And that element is likely to pronounce itself later on; for where there is no impersonal governing principle and no clear original structure in the international body, its motions must be determined by a balance of interests, and the balance of interests can only be kept reasonably steady by carefully preserving an established balance of power. That was the justification of the old armed order; it is likely to be a necessity of this new system for regulating chaos. This creation is a realistic practical construction with a very minimum concession to the new idealism: it has been erected by statesmen who have been concerned to legalise the actual facts and organise the actual forces which have emerged from the World War – a few inconveniently new-born and of a menacing significance which have been barred and boycotted, blockaded or pressed out of existence: it is hoped also to secure their system against attack by any resuscitable ghost of the past or violently subversive genius of the future. From that point of view it has been constructed with a remarkable skill and fidelity to present realities, though one may be tempted to think with an insufficient allowance for obscure but already visible potentialities. The correspondence between fact and form is accurate to perfection. Five Powers have been the real victors of the war, three of them central and decisive forces who now actually control the world by their will, and two others who intervened as less powerful subsidiary strengths, but can put in some effective claim and material weight into the future balance of forces. This fact is reproduced in the constitution of the governing body; it is these Five who by virtue of their wealth and force are to have in it a permanent voice, the three great ones’ to strike the major chords and determine the general harmony of the concert, the two others to bring in, as best they can and when they can, minor Page-618 chords and unessential variations. Then there are the great number of small or weaker nations who have at their command minor material effectives and, though incapable of being principals in any very great conflict may be useful as minor auxiliaries, the free peoples, allies included from the beginning by right, neutrals invited to participate in a settled organisation of ‘peace though they did not throw their weight into the decision of war, enemies, old or new, who may be admitted when they have satisfied more or less onerous or crushing and disabling conditions. These will make the general assembly: some of them will have from time to time an uncertain voice in the governing body; the rest will be the mass, the commons, the general body who will possess some limited amount of actual power and some kind of moral force behind the executive. Labour too has been made by the War a great though as yet incoherent international power, and the League, wishing evidently to be wise in time and make terms with this formidable new fact, recognises at its side Labour in a special separate conference. But there are also new Asiatic peoples who cannot now be admitted, because they are infants and unripe; there are subject and protected nations for whom the war was not fought and who cannot share in the once hoped-for general freedom, but must trust to the generous and unselfish liberalism of their rulers and protectors; there are African tribes who are the yet unmanufactured raw material of humanity. These are to be left under the old or put under a new control or are to be entrusted to the paternal hands of this or that governing power who will be in the legal style of the new dispensation, not masters and conquerors, - for in this just and miraculous peace there are no annexations, only rectified arrangements of control and territory, - but trustees, mandatories. A mandate from the League will be the safe- guard of these less fortunate peoples. For we are, it seems, about to live in quite a new moralized world in which the general con- science of mankind will be wide awake and effective and the League is there to represent it. As its representative it will take a periodical report of their trust from the trustees, – who also as the great Powers of the League will be themselves at once mandatories, leaders and deputies of this same general con- Page-619 science. All existing forces are represented in just proportions in this very remarkable constitution. .
Page-620 tract perfection of principles which are not in correspondence with the actualities of things and, if prematurely applied, are likely to bring in a worse confusion, but can only be accomplished by a strong and capable organised Force which will take things as they stand, impose a new system of law and order on this chaos, some firm however imperfect initial framework, and watch over its development with a strict eye on the practical possibilities of progress. On that safe and firm basis a slow but sure and deliberate advance can be made towards a future better law and ideal order. There is another side to the question, but let us suppress it for the moment and give full value and weight to the considerations. But all the more indispensable does it then become that the principles of the progress to be made shall be recognised from the beginning in the law and constitution of the League, or at least indicated in such a way and so impressed on its system as to ensure that on those lines or towards the fulfilment of those principles its action should proceed and not be diverted to other, baser, reactionary or obstructive uses. The declaration of general principles and their embodiments and safeguards in the democratic constitutions promulgated in the eighteenth century were no barren ideologists’ formularies, – any more than the affirmation of constitutional principles in earlier documents like the Magna Charta, – but laid down the basis on which government and progress must proceed in the new-born order of the world and were at once a signpost and an effective moral guarantee for the assured march of Democracy. We look in vain in the constitution of the League for any such great guiding principles. The provisions for the diminution of the possibilities of war, the creation of some new small nation and the safety given to those that already existed can hardly be called by that name. There is here no hint of any charter of the international rights and duties of the peoples in a new order making at once for liberty and union. The principle of self-determination over which the later stages of the war were fought has been ruthlessly thrown overboard and swallowed up in the jaws of a large pot-bellied diplomatic transaction, – it may be only for a time like the prophet in the stomach of the whale, but for the nonce there is an Page-621 almost
perfect disappearance. Some infinitesimal shadow of it we see in petty
transactions like the arrangements’ about Schleswig- Holstein, but for the rest
the map of the world has been altered very much in the old familiar fashion
without any consistent regard to nationality or choice, but rather by the
agreement and fiat of armed victorious nations. A famous pronouncement during
the war had denounced the theory of trusteeship, that cloak which can cover
with so noble a grace the hard reality of domination and exploitation,
- things now too
gross in their nakedness to be presented undraped to the squeamish moral sense
of a modern humanity. But in this after-war system that very theory of
trusteeship is glorified and consecrated, though with the gloss of a mandate subject
to examination - by a body whose action and deliberation will be
controlled by the trustees. Subject nations are still to exist in this world;
for the system of mandates is only to be applied where a previous subjection
has been abrogated, it is to be applied to some of the Asiatic or African
peoples who lay under the uplifted scourge of the now fallen empires; the rest
who had the advantage of milder masters, the remaining subject peoples from
Ireland to Korea, have no need of any such safeguard! Page-622
status
quo, a provision for minor
manipulations and alterations; but there is little actual foundation for a new
and nobler world-, order. A preparation for it may have been the intention of
the institutors, but the fulfilment of their intention is left very much at the
mercy of the uncertain chances of the future. The idealism of the founder has
so far triumphed as to get some limited form of a League of Nations admitted
and put into shape, but at every other point the idealist has gone under and
the stamp of the politician and diplomat is over this whole new modern machine,
- of the mere practical man with his short sight and his rough and ready
methods. It is a leaky and ill-balanced ship launched on waters of tempest and
chaos without a chart or compass or sailing instructions. Page-623 interests it proposes to manage. A poor starting wind for so momentous a voyage. But let us suppose the system accepted and under way, - what are the actual facts which will meet it in the future? Its system will stand for a long time to come for the nations conquered in the war as a perpetuation of their downfall diminution and disgrace; it will be to them a gaoler and inflicter of penalties, a guardian of tasks and payments with an uplifted scourge. It need not have been so, if a generous and equal peace had been made or, better, if apart from an such questions, there had been a peace based not on the will of a conquering might, even though better-minded than the might it conquered, but on clear and undeniable principles, such as the utmost possible self-determination, equal opportunity, equal position for the world’s peoples; that would have been indeed a peace without any other victors or vanquished than vanquished force and wrong and victorious equity. But the leading nations have chosen to impose a diplomatic peace in which the League which imposes it figures as an administrator of criminal justice. The vanquished nations, now for the most part democracies and no longer the old aggressive militarisms which made the war, were, it is said, criminals and breakers of peace and the penalty inflicted is far too light in comparison with their crimes. It may be so in literal terms, - though a criminal justice inflicted by one of two parties in a quarrel on his beaten opponent and not by an impartial judge is apt rightly or wrongly to be suspect to the mere human reason and at best much of what is caned justice is only legalised revenge, – but still it may be that nothing but justice or even less than justice has been done. But that makes no difference to the fact that a number of new democracies, vigorous and intellectual peoples, born to a new life which should have been one of hope and good will to the coming order, will be there inevitably as a source of revolt and disorder, eager to support any change which will remove their burdens, gratify resentment and heal their festering wounds. They may be held down, kept weak and maimed, even though one of them is laborious, skilful, organised Germany, but that will mean a weakness and an ill-balance in the new order itself, and if they recover strength, it will not be to Page-624 acquiesce in their inferior place and the perpetual triumph and greatness of their ancient rivals. Only in a legalised system of equal democracies can there be some true chance of the cessation of these jealousies, enmities, recurrent struggles. Otherwise war will break out again or in some other form the old battle continue. An unequal balance can never be a security for a steady and peaceful world-system. Pass, if this were the only peril of the newly inaugurated sys- tem. But this League seems also to stand for a perpetuation of a new status quo to be arrived at by the peace which is being made its foundation. The great Powers, it would seem, have arrived at a compact to secure their dominions and holdings against any future menace of diminution. This arrangement is of the nature at once of a balance of power, - but with all the dangers of an unequal balance, – and of an attempt to perpetuate for ever certain at present preponderating influences and established greatnesses. That attempt is against all the teaching of history and all. the perennial movement of Nature; the League which stands committed to it is committed to a jealously guarded insecurity and the preservation of an unstable equilibrium. It is not certain that the constructing Powers themselves remain consistently satisfied with the terms of their compact or able to resist that urge of national and of human destiny which is greater than any diplomatic arrangement or the wills of governments and statesmen. But even if that unheard-of thing be realised between them, a durable international friendship and alliance, it may serve for a time, but will it serve for a very long time against the world’s urge towards change? Power rots by having security, and those who are powerful to-day to impose their will on the nations, may not always keep that force in spite of their bulk and wealth and armed magnitudes. Then there are old sores perpetuated and new sores opened by this arrangement of a hastily made peace of devices and compromises. Whether the Balkan question will be permanently settled is at least dubious; but there will be now the question of a German Bohemia, a particoloured Poland, perhaps, a Saar region with its wealth in the possession of a foreign Power, an insoluble question of Yugoslav and Italian, a new question of Tyrol, an Irish trouble and a Page-625 Korean trouble in which the League cannot interfere without deep offence to England and Japan and which yet clamour more and more for a settlement, a Russian chaos. There is a Mahomedan world which will one day have a word to say about the new status quo. There is the whole question of Asia and Africa., which is the most formidable but of which much need not be said, for its issues are patent to every eye. The partition of Africa between a few European powers with all its economical advantages can be no permanent solution. Asia is arising in the surge of an upward wave and cannot always be kept in a condition of weakness, tutelage and vassalage. When the time comes, how will a league mainly of European and American peoples deal with her claims? Will Europe be content to recede from Asia? Will the mandatories be in any haste to determine their mandate? Can there be any modified perpetuation of present conditions which will be at all compatible with an equality between the two continents? These are questions which no imperfect sketch of a league of nations on the existing basis can decide according to its phantasy; only the onward moving world-spirit can give them their answer. None of these dangers and difficulties are as yet formidable in their immediate incidence, but there is another problem of a pressing, immediate insistency and menace which touches with its close foreshadowing finger the very life of any new international system and that is the approaching struggle for supremacy between Capital and Labour. This is a far other matter than the clash of conflicting imperialisms in the broad spaces or the wrangle of quarrelsome nationalisms snarling at each other’s heels or tearing each other in the narrower ways of the Earth; for those are questions at most of division of power, territory and economic opportunity on the present basis of society, but this means a questioning of that basis and a shaking of the very foundations of the European world-order. This League is a league of governments, and all these governments are bourgeois monarchies or republics, instruments of a capitalistic system assailed by the tides of socialism.. Their policy is to compromise, to concede in detail, but to prolong their own principle so that they may survive and capitalism be still the dominant power of a new mixed semi- Page-626 socialistic
order, very much as the governments which formed the Holy Alliance sought to save
the dominance of the old idea of aristocratic monarchy by a compromise with the
growing spirit of democracy. What they offer is better and more human
conditions for the labourer, even a certain association in the government of
the society, but still a second and not a primary place in the scale. This was
indeed all to which Labour itself formerly aspired, and it is all to which the
rear of its army still looks for- ward, but it is already ceasing to be the
significance of the Labour movement; a new idea has arisen, the dominance, the
rule of labour, and it has already formulated itself and captured a great
portion of the forces of socialism. It has even established for a while in
Russia a new kind of government, a dictatorship of the proletariate, which
aspires to effect a rapid transition to another order of society. Page-627 the others. cannot be accomplished without much strife and
upheaval and there is every sign that its course will be attended with the
shattering violence of revolution. It is proposed indeed to the new force that
it shall work itself out calmly, slowly, peacefully by the recognised means of Parliamentarism; but Parliamentarism is passing through a phase of considerable
discredit, and a doubt has arisen in the minds of the workers whether it is at
all a right or possible means for their object and whether by a reliance upon
it they will not be playing into the hands of their opponents: for Parliament
is actually a great machine of the propertied classes and even the
Parliamentary socialist tends easily to become a semi-disguised or a half yield
to the rule of the Shudra, the proletariate, founded upon work and association.
This change like and half bourgeois. The new order of society would seem to
demand the institution of a new system of government. If then a new order of
society is bound to come with its inevitable reversal of existing conditions,
and still more if it comes by a revolutionary struggle, how will a system of a
League of Nations based upon existing conditions, a League not really of
nations but of governments, and of governments committed to the maintenance of
the old order and using their closer association as a means for combating the
new idea which is hostile to their own form of existence, be likely to fare in
this earth-shaking or this tornado? It is more likely to disappear than to
undergo a gentle transformation, and if it disappears, another system of
international comity may replace it, but it will not be a League of Nations. Page-628 history
of human civilisation. For it will mean that what was founded in the unit of
the nation centuries ago, will be now at last founded in the society of the
nations. But let us not leap too easily at what may well be an unsound
parallel. What civilised society has done most effectively from the beginning
is to substitute some kind of legalised relation, legalised offence and defence,
legalised compensation or revenge for injuries in place of the state of
insecure peace and frequent private or tribal warfare in which each man had to
claim what he considered to be justice by the aid of his kin or the strength of
his own hand. At present the persistent survival of crime is the only remnant
of that earlier pre-legal state of natural violence. But for an organised
society to deal with the refractory individual is a comparatively facile task;
here the units are nations with a complex corporate personality, great masses
of men themselves too organised, representing the vital interests, claims,
passions of millions of men divided by corporate, powerful and persistent
exclusivenesses, hatreds, jealousies, antipathies which the founding of this would-be
all- healing League and new society of peoples finds much acerbated, much more
pronounced than in the days before the deluge when a tolerant and easy
cosmopolitanism was more in fashion, and which its disposition seems calculated
to deepen and perpetuate rather than to heal and abolish. And it is on this
incoherent mass of peoples void of all living principle or urgent will of union
that a status of peace and settled law has to be imposed and this in a period
of increasing chaos, upheaval, menace of revolution. Page-629 secondary effects upon the countries whose governments are engaged in this singular international pastime. It is not difficult to see that a better system and a better means must be found if the latest strong hope of humanity is to turn out anything more than one other generous illusion of the intellectuals and one other chimerical wave of longing in the vague heart of the peoples. Even the national society has not been able after so long a
time and so much experience to eliminate in its own body the disease of strife
between its members, class war, bitter hostility of interests and ideas
breaking out at times into bloody clashes, civil wars, sanguinary revolutions
or disastrous, grimly obstinate and ruthless economical struggles which are the
preparers of an eventual physical conflict. And the reason is not far to seek.
Law for all its ermine of pomp and solemn bewigged pretension of dignity was in
its origin nothing but the law of the stronger and the more skilful and
successful who imposed their rule on the acquiescent or subjugated rest of the
people. It was the decrees of the dominant class which were imposed on the
previous mass of existing customs and new-shaped them into the mould of the
prevailing idea and interest; Law was itself a regulated and organised Force
establishing its own rules of administration and maintaining them by an
imminent menace of penalty and coercion. That is the sense of the symbolic
sword of Justice, and as for her more mythical balance, a balance is a
commercial and artificial sign, not a symbol of either natural or ideal equity,
and even so this balance of Justice had for its use only a theoretical or not
always even a theoretical equality of weights and measures. Law was often in
great measure a system of legalised oppression and exploitation and on its
political side has had often enough plainly that stamp, though it has assumed
always the solemn face of a sacrosanct order and government and justice. Page-630 injustice of law can only be tolerated so long as there is either in those who suffer by it a torpid blindness or acquiescent submission or else, the desire of equity once awakened, a ready means to their hand of natural and peaceful rectification. And a particular unjust law may indeed be got altered with less of effort and difficulty, but if injustice or, let us say simply, absence of just equality and equity pervades a state of things, a system, then there must be grave trouble and there can be no real equilibrium and peace till it is amended. Thus in modern society strikes and lockouts are its form of civil war, disastrous enough to both sides, but still they are constantly resorted to and cannot be replaced by a better way, because there is no confidence in any possible legal award or "compulsory" arbitration which can be provided for under the existing conditions. The stronger side relies on the ad- vantage which it enjoys under the established system, the weaker feels that the legalised balance of the State exists by a law which still favours the capitalist interest and the domination of wealth and that at most it can get from this State only inadequate con- cessions which involve by their inadequacy more numerous struggles in the future. They cling to the strike as their natural weapon and one trustworthy resource. For that reason all ingeminations and exhortations to economical peace and brotherhood are a futile counsel. The only remedy is a. better, more equal and more equitable system of society. And this is only a particular instance of a situation common enough in different forms under the present world-order. The application is evident to the present international at- tempt and its hopes of a legalised and peaceful human society. The League of Nations has been established by victorious Force, claiming no doubt to be the force of victorious right and justice, but incapable by the vice of its birth of embodying the real non- combatant justice of an equal and impartial equity. Its decrees and acts are based on no ascertainable impersonal principle, but are mainly the decrees, the sic volo, sic jubeo of three or four mighty nations. Even if they happen to be just, they have this fatal vice that there is nothing to convince the mind of the losing parties or even the common mind that there is behind them any surety of a general and reliable equity, and as a matter of fact Page-631 many of them have aroused very generally grave dissatisfaction and hostile criticism. And the Supreme Council, that veiled hieratic autocrat of the situation, does not seem itself to appeal to any distinct higher principles in its action, even when such do actually exist and could be insisted on with force and clarity. At the time of writing, there has been a case of the denudation of a suffering and now half-starved country by the army of a small occupying power – victorious not by its own arms, but by the moral and economic pressure of the League - and the council has very rightly interfered. But it has. not done that publicly on grounds that have anything to do with international justice or humanity or even the rudiments of international ethics, such as they are, but on this ground that the property of the vanquished country is the common spoil, or, let us say, means of compensation of the victors and this one little rapacious ally cannot be allowed to appropriate it all by main force to the detriment of its greater fellow-administrators of a self-regarding justice, - who may even as a result find Hungary thrown as a starving pauper on their hands instead of serving their will as a solvent debtor! If this realistic spirit is to be the spirit of the new international system and that is to persist, its success is likely to be more formidable to humanity than its failure. For it may mean to the suffering portions of mankind the legalisation and perpetuation of in- tolerable existing injustices for which there could have been a hope of more easy remedy and redress in the previous looser conditions. If this League of Nations is to serve and not merely to dominate mankind, if it is to raise and free, as it claims and professes, and not to bind and depress humanity, it must be cast in another mould and animated by another spirit. This age is not like that in which the reign of law was established in individual nations; men are no longer inclined, as then they were, to submit to existing conditions in the idea that they are an inevitable dispensation of Nature. The idea of equity, of equality, of common rights has been generalised in the mind of the race, and human society must move henceforward steadily towards its satisfaction on peril of constant unrest and a rising gradation of catastrophe. That means that the whole spirit and system of the League will have to be remodelled, the initial mistakes of its composition Page-632 rectified and the defects inherent in its origin got rid of, before it can be brought into real consonance with the nobler hopes or even the pressing needs of the human race. At present it is, to reverse the old phrase, a pouring of an old and very musty wine into showy new bottles, – the old discredited spirit of the diplomacy of concert and balance and the government of the strongest, of the few dominant kingdoms, States and empires. That must disappear in a more just and democratic international system. The evil legacy of the war with its distinctions between "enemy", allied and friendly nations or more favoured or less favoured peoples, will have to be got out of the system of the League, for so long as it is there, it will act as a virus which will prevent all healthy growth and functioning. A League of Nations which is to bring a real peace and beginning of justice and ordered comity in progress to the world and a secret council of allied governments imposing as best they can their irresponsible will on a troubled and dissatisfied Europe, Asia and Africa are two very different things, and while one lasts, the other cannot be got into being. The haphazard make of the League will have to be remoulded into a thing of plain and candid structure and meaning and made to admit that element of clear principle which it has omitted from its constitution. An equal system of international rights and obligations, just liberties and wholesome necessary restrictions can alone be a sound basis of international law and order. And there can be no other really sound basis of the just and equal liberty of the peoples than that principle of self-determination which was so loudly trumpeted during the war, but of which an opportunist statesmanship has made short work and reduced to a deplorable nullity. A true principle of self-determination is not at all incompatible with international unity and mutual obligation, the two are rather indispensable complements, even as individual liberty in its right sense of a just and sufficient room for healthy self-development and self-determination is not at all incompatible with unity of spirit and mutual obligation between man and man. How to develop it out of present conditions, antipathies, ambitions, grievances, national lusts, jealousies, egoisms is indeed a problem, but it is a problem which will have to be attended to to-day or to-morrow on peril of worse Page-633
Page-634 system as false and defective as the industrial civilization of Europe which in its inflated and monstrous course brought about the present wreck, or it may come in the form and healthy movement of a sounder shaping force which can be made the basis or at least the starting-point for a still greater and more beneficial human progress. No system indeed by its own force can bring about the change that humanity really needs; for that can only come by its growth into the firmly realised possibilities of its own higher nature, and this growth depends on an inner and not an outer change. But outer changes may at least prepare favourable conditions for that more real amelioration, - or on the contrary they may lead to such conditions that the sword of Kalki can alone purify the earth from the burden of an obstinately Asuric humanity. The choice lies with the race itself; for as it sows, so shall it reap the fruit of its Karma. And that brings us back to the idea with which we started and with it we may as well close, however remote it may sound to the practical mind of a still materialistic generation. The idea which Europe follows of an outer political and social perfection reposes, as far as it goes, on a truth, but only on one half of the truth and that the lower half of its periphery. A greater side of it is hidden behind the other older idea, still not quite dead in Asia and now strong enough to be born again in Europe, that as with the individual, so with the community of mankind, salvation cannot come by the outer Law alone; for the Law is only an intermediate means intended to impose a rein of stringent obligation and a better standard on the original disorder of our egoistic nature. Salvation for individual or community comes not by the Law but by the Spirit1 The conditions of individual and social perfection are indeed the same, freedom and unity; the two things are complements and to follow one at the expense of the other is a vain heresy. But real unity cannot come to the race, until man surmounting his egoistic nature is one in heart and spirit with man and real freedom cannot be till he is free from his own lower nature and finds the force of the truth which has been
1 We in India have also yet to realise that truth - not by the Shastra, but by the Atman Page-635 so vainly taught by the saints and sages that the fullness of his perfected individuality is one thing with a universality by which he can embrace all mankind in his heart, mind and .spirit. But at present individuals and nations are equally remote from accepting any such inner mantra of unity and we can only hope at most that the best will increasingly turn their minds in that direction and create again and this time with a newer and more luminous insistence a higher standard of human aspiration. Till then jarring leagues of nations and some mechanical dissoluble federation of the race must serve our turn for practice and for a far-off expectation. But only then can the dream of a golden age of a true communal living become feasible and be founded on a spiritual and therefore a real reign of freedom and unity when the race learns to turn its eyes inward and not any longer these things, but mankind, the people of God and a soul and body of the Divine, becomes the ideal of our perfection. Page-636 |