Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

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[5] A.D. Lewis, _Syndicalism and the General Strike_.

[6] _The Division of the Product of Industry_.

[7] _First and Last Things_ (pp. 148-9. Published in 1908).

PATRIOTISM

(1915)

The sentiment of patriotism has seemed to many to mark an arrest of
development in the psychical expansion of the individual, a half-way
house between mere self-centredness and full human sympathy. Some
moralists have condemned it as pure egoism, magnified and disguised.
'Patriotism,' says Ruskin, 'is an absurd prejudice founded on an
extended selfishness.' Mr. Grant Allen calls it 'a vulgar vice--the
national or collective form of the monopolist instinct.' Mr. Havelock
Ellis allows it to be 'a virtue--among barbarians.' For Herbert Spencer
it is 'reflex egoism--extended selfishness.' These critics have made the
very common mistake of judging human emotions and sentiments by their
roots instead of by their fruits. They have forgotten the Aristotelian
canon that the 'nature' of anything is its completed development (he
phusis telos estin). The human self, as we know it, is a transitional
form. It had a humble origin, and is capable of indefinite enhancement.
Ultimately, we are what we love and care for, and no limit has been set
to what we may become without ceasing to be ourselves. The case is the
same with our love of country. No limit has been set to what our country
may come to mean for us, without ceasing to be our country. Marcus
Aurelius exhorted himself--'The poet says, Dear city of Cecrops; shall
not I pay, Dear city of God?' But the city of God in which he wished to
be was a city in which he would still live as 'a Roman and an Antonine.'
The citizen of heaven knew that it was his duty to 'hunt Sarmatians' on
earth, though he was not obliged to imbrue his hands with 'Caesarism.'

Patriotism has two roots, the love of clan and the love of home. In
migratory tribes the former alone counts; in settled communities
diversities of origin are often forgotten. But the love of home, as we
know it, is a gentler and more spiritual bond than clanship. The word
home is associated with all that makes life beautiful and sacred, with
tender memories of joy and sorrow, and especially with the first eager
outlook of the young mind upon a wonderful world. A man does not as a
rule feel much sentiment about his London house, still less about his
office or factory. It is for the home of his childhood, or of his
ancestors, that a man will fight most readily, because he is bound to it
by a spiritual and poetic tie. Expanding from this centre, the sentiment
of patriotism embraces one's country as a whole.

Both forms of patriotism--the local and the racial, are frequently
alloyed with absurd, unworthy or barbarous motives. The local patriot
thinks that Peebles, and not Paris, is the place for pleasure, or asks
whether any good thing can come out of Nazareth. To the Chinaman all
aliens are 'outer barbarians' or 'foreign devils.' Admiration for
ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and
dislike for foreigners. Our own nation has a peculiarly bad record in
this respect. In the reign of James I the Spanish ambassador was
frequently insulted by the London crowd, as was the Russian ambassador
in 1662; not, apparently, because we had a burning grievance against
either of those nations, but because Spaniards and Russians are very
unlike Englishmen. That at least is the opinion of the sagacious Pepys
on the later of these incidents. 'Lord! to see the absurd nature of
Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that
looks strange.' Defoe says that the English are 'the most churlish
people alive' to foreigners, with the result that 'all men think an
Englishman the devil.' In the 17th and 18th centuries Scotland seems to
have ranked as a foreign country, and the presence of Scots in London
was much resented. Cleveland thought it witty to write:--

Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom;
Not forced him wander, but confined him home.

And we all remember Dr. Johnson's gibes.

British patriotic arrogance culminated in the 18th and in the first half
of the 19th century; in Lord Palmerston it found a champion at the head
of the government. Goldsmith describes the bearing of the Englishman of
his day:--

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by.

Michelet found in England 'human pride personified in a people,' at a
time when the characteristic of Germany was 'a profound impersonality.'
It may be doubted whether even the arrogant brutality of the modern
Prussian is more offensive to foreigners than was the calm and haughty
assumption of superiority by our countrymen at this time. Our
grandfathers and great-grandfathers were quite of Milton's opinion,
that, when the Almighty wishes something unusually great and difficult
to be done, He entrusts it to His Englishmen. This unamiable
characteristic was probably much more the result of insular ignorance
than of a deep-seated pride. 'A generation or two ago,' said Mr. Asquith
lately, 'patriotism was largely fed and fostered upon reciprocal
ignorance and contempt.' The Englishman seriously believed that the
French subsisted mainly upon frogs, while the Frenchman was equally
convinced that the sale of wives at Smithfield was one of our national
institutions. This fruitful source of international misunderstanding has
become less dangerous since the facilities of foreign travel have been
increased. But in the relations of Europe with alien and independent
civilisations, such as that of China, we still see brutal arrogance and
vulgar ignorance producing their natural results.

Another cause of perverted patriotism is the inborn pugnacity of the
_bete humaine_. Our species is the most cruel and destructive of all
that inhabit this planet. If the lower animals, as we call them, were
able to formulate a religion, they might differ greatly as to the shape
of the beneficent Creator, but they would nearly all agree that the
devil must be very like a big white man. Mr. McDougall[8] has lately
raised the question whether civilised man is less pugnacious than the
savage; and he answers it in the negative. The Europeans, he thinks, are
among the most combative of the human race. We are not allowed to knock
each other on the head during peace; but our civilisation is based on
cut-throat competition; our favourite games are mimic battles, which I
suppose effect for us a 'purgation of the emotions' similar to that
which Aristotle attributed to witnessing the performance of a tragedy:
and, when the fit seizes us, we are ready to engage in wars which cannot
fail to be disastrous to both combatants. Mr. McDougall does not regret
this disposition, irrational though it is. He thinks that it tends to
the survival of the fittest, and that, if we substitute emulation for
pugnacity, which on other grounds might seem an unmixed advantage, we
shall have to call in the science of eugenics to save us from becoming
as sheeplike as the Chinese. There is, however, another side to this
question, as we shall see presently.

Another instinct which has supplied fuel to patriotism of the baser sort
is that of acquisitiveness. This tendency, without which even the most
rudimentary civilisation would be impossible, began when the female of
the species, instead of carrying her baby on her back and following the
male to his hunting-grounds, made some sort of a lair for herself and
her family, where primitive implements and stores of food could be kept.
There are still tribes in Brazil which have not reached this first step
towards humanisation. But the instinct of hoarding, like all other
instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the
institution of private property comes another institution--that of
plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at
present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which, unlike
most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough
when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then. The
acquisition and possession of land satisfies this desire in a high
degree, since land is a visible and indestructible form of property.
Consequently, as soon as the instincts of the individual are transferred
to the group, territorial aggrandisement becomes a main preoccupation of
the state. This desire was the chief cause of wars, while kings and
nobles regarded the territories over which they ruled as their private
estates. Wherever despotic or feudal conditions survive, such ideas are
likely still to be found, and to cause dangers to other states. The
greatest ambition of a modern emperor is still to be commemorated as a
'Mehrer des Reichs.'

Capitalism, by separating the idea of property from any necessary
connection with landed estate, and democracy, by denying the whole
theory on which dynastic wars of conquest are based, have both
contributed to check this, perhaps the worst kind of war. It would,
however, be a great error to suppose that the instinct of
acquisitiveness, in its old and barbarous form, has lost its hold upon
even the most civilised nations. When an old-fashioned brigand appears,
and puts himself at the head of his nation, he becomes at once a popular
hero. By any rational standard of morality, few greater scoundrels have
lived than Frederick the Great and Napoleon I. But they are still names
to conjure with. Both were men of singularly lucid intellect and
entirely medieval ambitions. Their great achievement was to show how
under modern conditions aggressive war may be carried on without much
loss (except in human life) to the aggressor. They tore up all the
conventions which regulated the conduct of warfare, and reduced it to
sheer brigandage and terrorism. And now, after a hundred years, we see
these methods deliberately revived by the greatest military power in the
world, and applied with the same ruthlessness and with an added pedantry
which makes them more inhuman. The perpetrators of the crime calculated
quite correctly that they need fear no reluctance on the part of the
nation, no qualms of conscience, no compassionate shrinking, no remorse.
It must, indeed, be a bad cause that cannot count on the support of the
large majority of the people at the _beginning_ of a war. Pugnacity,
greed, mere excitement, the contagion of a crowd, will fill the streets
of almost any capital with a shouting and jubilant mob on the day after
a war has been declared.

And yet the motives which we have enumerated are plainly atavistic and
pathological. They belong to a mental condition which would conduct an
individual to the prison or the gallows. We do not argue seriously
whether the career of the highwayman or burglar is legitimate and
desirable; and it is impossible to maintain that what is disgraceful for
the individual is creditable for the state. And apart from the
consideration that predatory patriotism deforms its own idol and makes
it hateful in the eyes of the world, subsequent history has fully
confirmed the moral instinct of the ancient Greeks, that national
insolence or injustice (hybrist) brings its own severe punishment. The
imaginary dialogue which Thucydides puts into the mouth of the Athenian
and Melian envoys, and the debate in the Athenian Assembly about the
punishment of revolted Mitylene, are intended to prepare the reader for
the tragic fate of the Sicilian expedition. The same writer describes
the break-up of all social morality during the civil war in words which
seem to herald the destruction not only of Athens but of Greek freedom.
Machiavelli's 'Prince' shows how history can repeat itself, reiterating
its lesson that a nation which gives itself to immoral aggrandisement is
far on the road to disintegration. Seneca's rebuke to his slave-holding
countrymen, 'Can you complain that you have been robbed of the liberty
which you have yourselves abolished in your own homes?' applies equally
to nations which have enslaved or exploited the inhabitants of subject
lands. If the Roman Empire had a long and glorious life, it was because
its methods were liberal, by the standard of ancient times. In so far as
Rome abused her power, she suffered the doom of all tyrants.

The illusions of imperialism have been made clearer than ever by the
course of modern history. Attempts to destroy a nationality by
overthrowing its government, proscribing its language, and maltreating
its citizens, are never successful. The experiment has been tried with
great thoroughness in Poland; and the Poles are now more of a nation
than they were under the oppressive feudal system which existed before
the partitions. Our own empire would be a ludicrous failure if it were
any part of our ambition to Anglicise other races. The only English
parts of the empire were waste lands which we have peopled with our own
emigrants. We hauled down the French flag in Canada, with the result
that Eastern Canada is now the only flourishing French colony, and the
only part of the world where the French race increases rapidly. We have
helped the Dutch to multiply with almost equal rapidity in South Africa.
We have added several millions to the native population of Egypt, and
over a hundred millions to the population of India. Similarly, the
Americans have made Cuba for the first time a really Spanish island, by
driving out its incompetent Spanish governors and so attracting
immigrants from Spain. On the whole, in imperialism nothing fails like
success. If the conqueror oppresses his subjects, they will become
fanatical patriots, and sooner or later have their revenge; if he treats
them well, and 'governs them for their good,' they will multiply faster
than their rulers, till they claim their independence. The Englishman
now says, 'I am quite content to have it so'; but that is not the old
imperialism.

The notion that frequent war is a healthy tonic for a nation is scarcely
tenable. Its dysgenic effect, by eliminating the strongest and
healthiest of the population, while leaving the weaklings at home to be
the fathers of the next generation, is no new discovery. It has been
supported by a succession of men, such as Tenon, Dufau, Foissac, de
Lapouge, and Richet in France; Tiedemann and Seeck in Germany; Guerrini
in Italy; Kellogg and Starr Jordan in America. The case is indeed
overwhelming. The lives destroyed in war are nearly all males, thus
disturbing the sex equilibrium of the population; they are in the prime
of life, at the age of greatest fecundity; and they are picked from a
list out of which from 20 to 30 per cent. have been rejected for
physical unfitness. It seems to be proved that the children born in
France during the Napoleonic wars were poor and undersized--30
millimetres below the normal height. War combined with religious
celibacy to ruin Spain. 'Castile makes men and wastes them,' said a
Spanish writer. 'This sublime and terrible phrase sums up the whole of
Spanish history.' Schiller was right; 'Immer der Krieg verschlingt die
besten.' We in England have suffered from this drain in the past; we
shall suffer much more in the next generation.

We have fed our sea for a thousand years,
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead.

We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full.

Aggressive patriotism is thus condemned by common sense and the verdict
of history no less than by morality. We are entitled to say to the
militarists what Socrates said to Polus:

This doctrine of yours has now been examined and found
wanting. And this doctrine alone has stood the test--that we
ought to be more afraid of doing than of suffering wrong;
and that the prime business of every man [and nation] is not
to seem good, but to be good, in all private and public
dealings.

If the nations would render something more than lip-service to this
principle, the abolition of war would be within sight; for, as Ruskin
says, echoing the judgment of the Epistle of St. James, 'The first
reason for all wars, and for the necessity of national defences, is that
the majority of persons, high and low, in all European countries, are
thieves.' But it must be remembered that, in spite of the proverb, it
takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep
to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains
of a different opinion.

Our own conversion to pacificism, though sincere, is somewhat recent.
Our literature does not reflect it. Bacon is frankly militarist:

Above all, for empire and greatness, it importeth most, that
a nation do profess arms, as their principal honour, study,
and occupation. For the things which we formerly have spoken
of are but habilitations towards arms; and what is
habitation without intention and act?... It is so plain that
a man profiteth in that he most intendeth, that it needeth
not to be stood upon. It is enough to point at it; that no
nation, which doth not directly profess arms, may look to
have greatness fall into their mouths.

A state, therefore, 'ought to have those laws or customs, which may
reach forth unto them just occasions of war.' Shakespeare's 'Henry V'
has been not unreasonably recommended by the Germans as 'good
war-reading.' It would be easy to compile a _catena_ of bellicose maxims
from our literature, reaching down to the end of the 19th century. The
change is perhaps due less to progress in morality than to that
political good sense which has again and again steered our ship through
dangerous rocks. But there has been some real advance, in all civilised
countries. We do not find that men talked about the 'bankruptcy of
Christianity' during the Napoleonic campaigns. Even the Germans think it
necessary to tell each other that it was Belgium who began this war.

But, though pugnacity and acquisitiveness have been the real foundation
of much miscalled patriotism, better motives are generally mingled with
these primitive instincts. It is the subtle blend of noble and ignoble
sentiment which makes patriotism such a difficult problem for the
moralist. The patriot nearly always believes, or thinks he believes,
that he desires the greatness of his country because his country stands
for something intrinsically great and valuable. Where this conviction is
absent we cannot speak of patriotism, but only of the cohesion of a
wolf-pack. The Greeks, who at last perished because they could not
combine, had nevertheless a consciousness that they were the trustees
of civilisation against barbarism; and in their day of triumph over the
Persians they were filled, for a time, with an almost Jewish awe in
presence of the righteous judgment of God. The 'Persae' of AEschylus is
one of the noblest of patriotic poems. The Romans, a harder and coarser
race, had their ideal of _virtus_ and _gravitas_, which included
simplicity of life, dignity and self-restraint, honesty and industry,
and devotion to the state. They rightly felt that these qualities
constituted a vocation to empire. There was much harshness and injustice
in Roman imperialism; but what nobler epitaph could even the British
empire desire than the tribute of Claudian, when the weary Titan was at
last stricken and dying:

Haec est, in gremium victos quae sola recepit,
humanumque genus communi nomine fovit
matris non dominae ritu, civesque vocavit
quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit?

Jewish patriotism was of a different kind. A federation of fierce
Bedouin tribes, encamped amid hostile populations, and set in the
cockpit of rival empires against which it was impossible to stand, the
Israelites were hammered by misfortune into the most indestructible of
all organisms, a theocracy. Their religion was to them what, in a minor
degree, Roman Catholicism has been to Ireland and Poland, a consecration
of patriotic faith and hope. Westphal says the Jews failed because they
hated foreigners more than they loved God. They have had good reason to
hate foreigners. But undoubtedly the effect of their hatred has been
that the great gifts which their nation had to give to humanity have
come through other hands, and so have evoked no gratitude. In the first
century of our era they were called to an almost superhuman abnegation
of their inveterate nationalism, and they could not rise to it. As
almost every other nation would have done, they chose the lower
patriotism instead of the higher; and it was against their will that the
religion of civilised humanity grew out of Hebrew soil. But they gained
this by their choice, tragic though it was, that they have stood by the
graves of all the empires that oppressed them, and have preserved their
racial integrity and traditions in the most adverse circumstances. The
history of the Jews also shows that oppression and persecution are far
more efficacious in binding a nation together than community of interest
and national prosperity. Increase of wealth divides rather than unites a
people; but suffering shared in common binds it together with hoops of
steel.

The Jews were the only race whose spiritual independence was not crushed
by the Roman steam-roller. It would be unfair to say that Rome destroyed
nations; for her subjects in the West were barbarous tribes, and in the
East she displaced monarchies no less alien to their subjects than her
own rule. But she prevented the growth of nationalities, as it is to be
feared we have done in India; and the absence of sturdy independence in
the countries round the Mediterranean, especially in the Greek-speaking
provinces, made the final downfall inevitable. The lesson has its
warning for modern theorists who wish to obliterate the sentiment of
nationality, the revival of which, after a long eclipse, has been one of
the achievements of modern civilisation. For it was not till long after
the destruction of the Western Roman Empire that nationality began to
assume its present importance in Europe.

The transition from medieval to modern history is most strongly marked
by the emergence of this principle, with all that it involves. At the
end of the Middle Ages Europe was at last compelled to admit that the
grand idea of an universal state and an universal church had definitely
broken down. Hitherto it had been assumed that behind all national
disputes lay a _ius gentium_ by which all were bound, and that behind
all religious questions lay the authority of the Roman Catholic Church,
from which there was no appeal. The modern period which certainly does
not represent the last word of civilisation, has witnessed the
abandonment of these ideas. The change took place gradually. France
became a nation when the English raids ceased in the middle of the 15th
century. Spain achieved unity a generation later by the union of Castile
and Aragon and the expulsion of the Moors from the peninsula. Holland
found herself in the heroic struggle against Spain in the 16th century.
But the practice of conducting wars by hiring foreign mercenaries, a
sure sign that the nationalist spirit is weak, continued till much
later. And the dynastic principle, which is the very negation of
nationalism, actually culminated in the 18th century; and this is the
true explanation of the feeble resistance which Europe offered to the
French revolutionary armies, until Napoleon stirred up the dormant
spirit of nationalism in the peoples whom he plundered. 'In the old
European system,' says Lord Acton, 'the rights of nationalities were
neither recognised by governments nor asserted by the people. The
interests of the reigning families, not those of the nations, regulated
the frontiers; and the administration was conducted generally without
any reference to popular desires.' Marriage or conquest might unite the
most diverse nations under one sovereign, such as Charles V.

While such ideas prevailed, the suppression of a nation did not seem
hateful; the partition of Poland evoked few protests at the time, though
perhaps few acts of injustice have recoiled with greater force on the
heads of their perpetrators than this is likely to do. Poles have been
and are among the bitterest enemies of autocracy, and the strongest
advocates of republicanism and racialism, in all parts of the world. The
French Revolution opened a new era for nationalism, both directly and
indirectly. The deposition of the Bourbons was a national act which
might be a precedent for other oppressed peoples. And when the
Revolution itself began to trample on the rights of other nations, an
uprising took place, first in Spain and then in Prussia, which proved
too strong for the tyrant. The apostasy of France from her own ideals of
liberty proved the futility of mere doctrines, like those of Rousseau,
and compelled the peoples to arm themselves and win their freedom by the
sword. The national militarism of Prussia was the direct consequence of
her humiliation at Jena and Auerstaedt, and of the harsh terms imposed
upon her at Tilsit. It is true that the Congress of Vienna attempted to
revive the old dynastic system. But for the steady opposition of
England, the clique of despots might have reimposed the old yoke upon
their subjects. The settlement of 1815 also left the entire centre of
Europe in a state of chaos; and it was only by slow degrees that Italy
and Germany attained national unity. Poland, the Austrian Empire, and
the Balkan States still remain in a condition to trouble the peace of
the world. In Austria-Hungary the clash of the dynastic and the
nationalist ideas is strident; and every citizen of that empire has to
choose between a wider and a narrower allegiance.

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