The Unity of Civilization by Various

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They are not insignificant, as we know to our cost. But by dwelling on
the things of greater moment and solidity, we train ourselves and others
to reduce the elements of discord to their true proportion and allay the
storm. The progress of a united mankind is thus an ideal, slowly
realizing itself in time. But its realization is quickened and rendered
wider and more beneficent, the more we think of it and believe in it. A
blow comes, such as the present war, and seems to shatter the whole
picture which so many hands have limned and so many eyes admired. Those
who have followed its growth through the ages, know well that no such
blow can finally destroy a living growth or even go very deep in
injuring its features.

It is surely a commonplace that in proportion as western populations,
from statesmen downwards, are animated by sentiments of comradeship
which arise from considerations such as these, the danger of war must
diminish and the possibilities of fruitful common action increase. Yet
there is probably no country in Europe where any deliberate attempt is
made to instruct the people in ideas which would most surely broaden
their sympathies and lay the foundations of peace.

The argument takes us back for a moment to the essay on education. We
left off there at a point where the old unity based on Greco-Roman
culture was seen to be disappearing in a confused mass of new studies,
partly suggested by modern languages and history, still more by the
growth of science and the application of science to the problems of
contemporary life. It may well be that in this conception of humanity,
the co-operation of mankind in a growing structure of thought, we shall
ultimately find the _idee-mere_ under which all the other subordinate
ideas in education may be grouped and inspired. This might take place if
the notion were grasped in no narrow sense, but so broadly that all
human thought, religion, and philosophy, art as well as science, might
find their justification in it.

The advantage of putting the educational issue first has been already
indicated. We can all get to work on it at once for ourselves, and it is
a far more fundamental and, in some respects, easier thing to introduce
a new idea into the minds of others than to alter the boundaries and
political conditions of States. If we once achieved a general atmosphere
of co-operation and goodwill in the world, the practical problems would
be already more than half solved.

Discussion will take place, with more and more vigour as years go on, as
to the various measures which have been described collectively as the
establishment of a World-State. At what point could it be said that a
World-State is in being? How can such a World-State be reconciled with
the independent sovereignty of the several States comprised in it? What
is to be the sanction imposing the decisions of the larger community on
its constituent members? Such are a few of the problems involved in any
advance towards the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism. None of them admit
of a single definite answer. They do not belong to questions of pure
theory, and we shall have to solve them slowly and with difficulty,
seizing every favourable opportunity of a slight advance, avoiding grave
obstacles, compromising with every possible friend.

But for the moment we seem likely to be overwhelmed by unchained
passions which are the practical denial of everything that the ideal of
humanity implies. Instead of co-operation we are faced by schemes of
conquest and domination, and the simplest notion of brotherhood is
limited to comradeship in arms for defence or attack. Many will be found
to ridicule the idea that any real progress in unity has ever been made,
or that the world can ever be envisaged except as an irksome enclosure
of rival armed forces thirsting for the fray. But to those who are not
prepared to accept this as the last word in human association the
argument of this volume may have some weight. It will lead those who
follow it to a quiet but well-grounded belief that the forces tending to
unity in the world are different in quality, incomparably greater in
scope than those which make for disruption. Discord is explosive and
temporary, harmony rises slowly but dominates the final chord.

Like the great common purposes of science, the common tendencies of
human action have in recent years suffered some eclipse through the
bustle of our activity and the multiplicity of its detail. The colours,
too, of a conflict of any kind are so much more vivid and arresting than
the quiet and monotonous tones of a long piece of harmonious and
co-operative work. The labours of such a bureau of international effort
as is described in Chapter X appear to our pressmen and publicists so
little interesting that they are practically ignored, and the results of
scientific congresses, being of a highly specialized kind, are left
perforce to those who can understand them. Yet it is precisely in these
things, if our diagnosis is correct, that the most characteristic
features of the age are to be found. For in them and in similar
movements we see united the two fundamental human traits from which we
started, reason and sympathy: reason winning triumphs over nature,
sympathy realizing itself at last in a community of men devoting their
powers to mutual aid. 'Idle dreams', it will be said, as we hurl more
and more millions of our best youth to destruction by the most highly
developed resources of science. Yes, but the same nations were only
yesterday celebrating the services of Pasteur, Virchow, and Lister to a
common humanity, and will do so again to-morrow or the day after.

It is in truth one of the most poignant features of the tragedy in which
we are manfully and rightly bearing our part, that the community-sense
in the world had never been so highly developed, or found so many
channels in which to diffuse itself, as just at the moment when the blow
fell. The socialist movements in all civilized countries have always had
this as a leading motive; comrades and poor among themselves, these men
have always been eager to stretch out a hand to those of like mind
abroad. And in the last chapter we saw how among Christian communities
throughout the world there has been in recent years a growing
approximation. Neither the cause nor the effects of such forces can die
away. They will reappear when the storm has passed and rebuild the
wreck.

One large aspect of the united action of the western world has received
no notice in this volume, though it might very well be the subject of a
detailed study in itself. This is the relation of the more advanced and
powerful nations of the West towards the weaker and less progressive
peoples. It might, indeed, be treated as the touchstone of our
civilization, just as the education of the young is a good, perhaps the
best, test of the advancement of any single people. For it involves some
joint action of the western nations; it shows how far they are
disinterested and how far skilful in their treatment of the less
advanced.

The record is not a good one, but it confirms, on the whole, the view we
have suggested that a growth of the sense and conception of humanity may
be traced from the time when modern science was born in the sixteenth
century. The Middle Ages hardly furnish us with any examples of the
action of Christendom towards heathen and weaker people until the
Crusades, in which, with rare examples of personal chivalry, the earlier
attitude was one of contempt and hatred of the unbeliever. In the
conquest of the New World, which was to some of its earliest conquerors
a new Crusade, there is the same general savagery marked by rare cases
of Christian kindness, such as Las Casas showed. But after the
Reformation, when the Church itself had been purified and more human
tolerance and care and interest in life prevailed, we find the
enlightened Jesuit missions to China and Paraguay, St. Francis Xavier's
work in India, and the Quaker dealings with Red Indians in the New
World. From the middle of the seventeenth century, slavery, which had
fallen into abeyance during the Middle Ages as a domestic institution,
began to be denounced as a trade. We are on the threshold of the great
humanitarian outburst of the eighteenth century. It is impossible to
believe that this growth of human feeling in dealing with other men is
unconnected with that new gospel of human power which Bacon and
Descartes had just proclaimed. Except for the occasional superman, the
greater the powers a man possesses and the higher he rates human
capacity at its best, the more careful he is to cherish and develop the
germs of humanity in the young and weak.

This was undoubtedly the case with the 'philosophers' of the eighteenth
century; it is equally true of the nineteenth century, an age wonderful
alike for its unexampled development of science and for the rise of
activities, national and international, for the betterment of the race.
Jointly the western nations have in this period put down the slave
trade, and in the Brussels Conference of 1890 we see the highest point
yet reached by the united humanity of the West expressed by the
assembled states in regard to backward people. The point therefore is a
notable one, and Englishmen will be glad to remember that it was Lord
Salisbury, then Foreign Secretary, who took the first step. The previous
Conference at Berlin, in 1884, had secured freedom of trade for the
basins of the Congo and the Niger, and in 1889 Lord Salisbury, through
the Belgian Government, called the Powers together to consider questions
relating to the slave trade in Africa. For Africa, home of the black
race, last exploited of the continents, discovered after the white man
had discovered science, was pre-eminently the part of the world where
the co-operation of leading peoples in civilizing backward races was
most needed and most to be expected. The Congo, the Herreros, Morocco,
Tripoli, Omdurman, offer a blood-stained record in reply.

But the general act of the Brussels Conference is clear and adequate as
to what the purpose of the Powers should be. "To put an end to the
crimes and devastations engendered by the traffic in African slaves, to
protect effectively the aboriginal populations of Africa, to ensure for
that vast continent the benefits of peace and civilization", is in fact
the whole duty of a united western civilization when dealing with the
less civilized. The results achieved may well seem small compared with
the magnitude of the purpose, but those who know most about it do not
despise them. Slave-raiding and tribal wars have been diminished and
some check put on importing arms and spirits.

It is not a topic on which it is easy to keep a cheerful mind. Some
Putumayo will constantly occur to remind us of the fierce brutality of
strength unsupervised and unrestrained. We compare the actual
performance of mankind when free to try their best or wreak their worst
on comparatively defenceless folk, with the noble rivalry which we can
imagine between the nations of the world in leading the weaker people to
develop their resources and themselves, on paths which may tend to the
greatest prosperity and happiness of all, advanced and backward
together: and the comparison leaves us sick at heart. But a sober
judgement will not deny that even here advance is being made. The ideal
has been admitted. The rights of smaller States are being made, as in
the present conflict, the subject of the concern of their strongest
neighbours. Steps are being taken all over the world to preserve and
ameliorate the remnants of primitive people. Horrors when revealed are
more strongly reprobated. Missionaries are pursuing their labours with
more enlightenment and zeal, and in wider spheres. In spite of cynics
and doubters, it is true in this as in the other activities of a united
mankind, _e pur si muove_. And as the work moves on it is seen to
involve the same guiding thoughts that inspire us in the case of the
young and feeble at home--pity for their weakness, love for their
humanity, hope for the future.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

_Kant's Perpetual Peace_ (new edition just published).

_International Policy_. Chapman & Hall.

Fayle, _The Great Settlement_. Murray.

_The Leadership of the World_. (Oxford pamphlet.)

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