IV.

In following out the psychical argument for regarding nations as final social areas I seem to have wandered very far from the biological basis, – the necessity of maintaining conflicts between nations for purposes of natural selection. In reality I have come round precisely to the point of divergence. Assuming it were possible to enthrone the will of the peoples and so to secure institutions of internationalism with a suspension of war, would the individuality of a nation perish? Would the nation lose vigor, become less efficient and perish? Is the maintenance of physical conflict essential to the natural selection of nations?

Turn again to the suspension of the cruder physical struggle which takes place in the evolution of tribal or national solidarity. As such national organization becomes stronger and more skillful, the ravages of intestine strife, starvation and certain diseases cease to be selective instruments, and the kind of individual fitness which was tested by them is superseded; the vast expenditure of individual energy formerly engaged in protecting life and in securing necessaries of life is reduced to insignificant dimensions: but the struggle for individual life is not abated, it is simply shifted on to higher planes of life than are implied in bare animal existence, nourishment and propagation. Instead of struggling for these simpler vital ends, individuals now struggle, with all the extra energy spared from the earlier struggles, for the ends of an enlarged and more complex life – for comfort and wealth, for place and personal honor, for skill, knowledge, character and ever higher forms of self-expression, and for services to their fellow men with whom they have identified themselves in that expanded individuality which we term altruism or public spirit. Individuality does not suffer, but greatly gains, by the suppression of the lower struggle; there is more energy, greater scope for its expression, a wider field of close competitors, and higher and more varied forms of fitness are evoked and tested. It is not even true that the struggle ceases to be physical; the strain and the support of the higher forms of struggle, even on the topmost intellectual and moral planes, are largely physical; the health and nervous energy which take part in the struggles of the legal or literary professions, or on any intellectual arena, are chief requisites, if not the supreme determinant, of success. In all the higher forms of struggle an elimination of the physically unfit is still maintained, though the criteria of physical unfitness are not quite the same as in the primitive human struggles. How arbitrary are the convenient distinctions between physical, intellectual and moral qualities and defects is nowise better illustrated than in the elaborate methods which modern complex civilization evolves for the detection, degradation and final extinction of bad stock, whose “degeneracy” is attested not less by physical than by mental and moral stigmata. The struggle for physical fitness never flags, but the physical forms part of a higher and more complex test of character determined by a higher standard of social utility. The point is that national government, or state socialism, using the term in its broad sense, as a coercive and educative force, does not, in so far as it is wisely exercised, diminish the individual struggle, repress individual vigor, reduce the arena for its display. It does just the opposite; it sharpens and varies the struggle; by equalizing certain opportunities it keeps a fairer ring, from which chance or other factors alien from personal fitness are excluded; it admits on more equal terms a larger number of competitors and so furnishes a better test of fitness and a more reliable selection of the fittest. Professor Pearson rightly urges that under truly enlightened national government the slow, painful and irregular elimination of bad stock which goes on through progressive degeneracy will be replaced by some rational control of parentage, at least to the extent of preventing through public education, or if necessary by law, the propagation of certain surely recognized unfitnesses.

Does a nation thus firmly planted in rational self-government, with individual competition within its ranks conducted most keenly over a wide variety of fields, furnishing the keenest incentive to the education and display of every kind of personal originality, really require a retention of the crude form of physical struggle with other nations in order to maintain its character and progress? If individuality does not disappear with the removal of the cruder struggle for life within the nation, why should the valid force of nationality disappear if a corresponding change takes place in the nature of international conflict? Does biology furnish any reason for believing that the competition among nations must always remain a crude physical struggle, and that the substitution of “rational” for “natural” selection among individual members of a nation cannot be extended to the selection of nations and of races? It is indeed sometimes suggested that the sole object and result of the stoppage of individual warfare and of the closer cooperation of individuals in a nation is to increase the efficiency of the nation for purposes of physical struggle with other nations; and it is stated or implied that the physical conflict of nations or races must ever remain a biological necessity; if the higher races sought to evade the conflict and ceased to equip themselves for it, they would be overwhelmed and crushed by the lower races. In other words, the lower struggle is suspended among individuals in order that it may be waged by nations; on the larger scale it remains a necessity of nature. Now, if we press the analogy of the lower forms of life, there is a plausibility in this argument. In these lower forms the physical struggle is primarily a struggle for food, and it might seem that the tendency of population to press upon the means of subsistence, which is the active force in the conflict throughout the animal world and in the past history of man, must continue as the dominant factor in the future.

If we point out that civilized societies of men can by the fuller development of their reason, wherein they differ from the rest of nature, reduce or eliminate direct pressure on the food supply, first, by their superior control over their material environment, secondly, by a tendency, now plainly visible, to check the growth of population, the biological argument is turned on to another track. If these nations, it is argued, are no longer called upon to struggle for food and check their growth of population while they increase their control over their material supplies, they will become effete for purposes of physical struggle; giving way to an easy and luxurious life, they will be attacked by lower races that multiply freely and maintain their military vigor, and will succumb in the conflict. This is the danger indicated by Mr. C.H. Pearson in his interesting book National Life and Character.

The whole argument rests, however, on a series of illusions regarding actual facts and tendencies. It is not true that the sole object and result of the stoppage of individual warfare has been the increase of the efficiency of the nation for the physical struggle with other nations. As man has risen from barbarism towards civilization, the struggle of each people to appropriate the land and food supply of other peoples has tended continuously to be replaced by the struggle of each to adapt its own material and social environment to purposes of better livelihood and life. This is the triumph of intensive over extensive cultivation; it implies a growing disposition to put into the arts of industry that energy which formerly went into war, and a growing success in the achievement of this end. It is the need of peaceful, steady, orderly cooperation for this work as the alternative to war, and not the need of war itself, that is the prime cause of the suspension of internecine struggles, at any rate in most societies. This is a matter of pivotal importance in understanding social evolution. If the sole or main purpose of suspending individual conflict was to strengthen the purely military power of a tribe or nation, and the further evolution of society aimed at this sort of social efficiency, it might well be attended by the decay of individual freedom and initiative, by the sacrifice of individuality to a national life. The fact that this result has not occurred, that in modern civilized nations there exists far more individual freedom, energy and initiative than in less advanced societies, attests the truth that military efficiency was not the first and sole object of social organization. In other words, the tendency of growing civilization on the national scale has been more and more to transform the struggle for life from a struggle with other nations into a struggle with environment, and to utilize the fruits of reason in such manner as to divert a larger and larger proportion of energy to struggles for intellectual, moral and aesthetic goods, with the result of a decrease in the struggle for goods which tax the powers of the earth and, conforming to the law of diminishing returns, tend to bring on international conflicts. As nations advance toward civilization it becomes less needful for them to contend with one another for land and food to support their increasing members, since their increased control of the industrial arts enables them to gain what they want by conquering nature instead of conquering their fellow-men.

This truth does not indeed disclose itself readily with its full brilliancy to the eyes of modern civilized peoples, whose greed for foreign wealth and foreign lands seems as fruitful a source of wars as in more primitive times. The illusion that it is necessary and advantageous to fight for new territory and distant markets, while leaving most imperfectly developed the home land and home markets, is slow to be dispelled. Its sources have been frequently explored; it has been traced to the dominance of class interests in national politics. Democracy alone will serve to fasten on the national mind the full economy of substituting the inner struggle with natural environment for the outer struggle with other nations. If, as seems possible, the civilized white nations, gradually throwing off the yoke of class governments whose interests make for war and territorial expansion, restrict their increase of population by preventing reproduction from bad stock, while they devote their energies to utilizing their national resources, the motives of international conflict will wane and the sympathetic motives of commerce and friendly intercourse will maintain permanent peace on a basis of international union.

Such a national economy would not only destroy the chief motives of war, but it would profoundly modify the industrial struggle in which governments engage. Democracies chiefly concerned with developing their own markets would not need to spend men and money in fighting for the chance of inferior and less stable foreign markets. Such rivalry as would remain would be the rivalry not of nations but of individual manufacturers and merchants within the nation; the national aspect of industrial warfare, by tariffs and bounties and commercial treaties, would disappear. The dangers and hostilities of national commercial policies are due, as we have seen, almost entirely to the usurpation of the authority and political resources of the nations by certain commercial and financial interests. Depose these interests, and the deep, true, underlying harmonies of interest between peoples, which the prophets of free trade dimly perceived, will manifest themselves; and the necessity of permanent industrial warfare between nations will be recognized as an illusion analogous in nature and origin to the illusion of the biological necessity of war.

The struggle for life is indeed a permanent factor in social progress; selection of the physically fit is a necessity; but as men become more rational they rationalize the struggle, substituting preventive for destructive methods of selection, and raising the standard of fitness from a mere crude physical robustness to one in which physical endurance is regarded as the raw material of higher psychical activities. Thus, while men no longer fight for food, their personal fitness is maintained; the struggle and the fitnesses are both raised to a higher plane. If this can take place in the struggle of individuals, it can take place in the struggle of nations. The economy of internationalism is the same as that of nationalism. As individuality does not disappear but is raised and quickened by good national government, so nationality does not disappear but is raised and quickened by internationalism.

War and commercial tariffs are the crudest and most wasteful forms of national struggles, testing the lowest forms of national fitness. Let international government put down wars and establish free trade, and the truly vital struggles of national expression will begin. As in the case of individuals so now of nations, the competition will be keener upon the higher levels; nations having ceased to compete with guns and tariffs will compete with feelings and ideas. Whatever there is of true original power and interest in the Celtic, the Teutonic, the various blends of Latin and Slavonic races, can bear its fruit only in times of peace. So far as nationality or race has any distinct character or value for itself and for the world, that value and character are expressed through work. Hitherto the absorption of so much national energy upon military and, in later times, rude industrial occupations has checked the higher forms of national self-expression; while the permanent hostility that has characterized international relations has chilled the higher intercourse and prevented what is really great and characteristic in the national achievements of art, literature and thought from penetrating other nations. For only through the reciprocal interpretation of national ideas, by subtle educative processes, is laid the foundation of true feelings of humanity, based, as such feelings perhaps must be, not on vague imaginative sympathy but upon common experience of life and common understanding.

Peaceful intercourse between nations is thus, not merely the condition, but also the powerful stimulus of national energy and achievement in the higher arts of life; for the self-appreciation of national pride can never furnish so wholesome an incentive or so sound a criterion of human excellence as the impartial judgment of civilized humanity, no longer warped by baser patriotic prejudices, but testing what is submitted to it by a universal standard. A few rare individuals of genius in art and literature, a few in science and in religion, have permanently broken the barriers of nationality and have become fertilizing, humanizing forces among peoples not their own, – such men as Jesus, Buddha, Mahomet, Homer, Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin. A larger number of great men have exercised some real and abiding influence upon the little world of science and letters, which in the Middle Ages attained an internationalism that disappeared in the rise of military nationalism and is being only slowly rediscovered in our own age. But, outside these conquests of personal genius, the streams of influence and achievement which might have fertilized the wide plains of the intellectual world have been confined within their narrow national channels. Nationalism as a restrictive and exclusive force, fostering political and industrial enmities and keeping down the competition of nationalities and races to the low level of military strife, has everywhere checked the free intercourse requisite for the higher kinds of competition, – the struggle of languages, literatures, scientific theories, religious, political and social institutions and all the arts and crafts which are the highest and most important expressions of national as well as of individual life.