001298 ritish Commonwealth in the Post-War WOrld

By

ALFRED ZIMMERN

d Lecture delivered at 'l'rinity College, Oxford, on 6 May I925 Prtfessor H. W. C. Davis in the Clzair

FLORIDA ATlANTIC UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

SOCIALIST· LABOR COLLECTION

LONDON OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS HUMPHREY MILFORD 1926 Pnce 0", Shilling net The :British Commonwealth

in the Post-War WOrld

By

ALFRED ZIMMERN

C!./.l Lecture delivered at Trinity College, Oxford, on 6 May £925 Professor H. W. C. Davis in the Chair

LONDON OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS HUMPHREY MILFORD 1926 Oxford University Press London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenbagen New r ark 'Ioronto Melbourne Cape 'Iown Bombay Calcutta Madras Shangbai Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY

Printed i .. England A I the OXFORD UNIVERSITV PRESS By Joh .. Jo/l1lso" Printer 10 Ihe Unioersily PREFACE 'My love for an institution', wrote the great Dr. Arnold, 'is the measure of my desire to reform it.' Somewhat similar is the attitude towards his country of a thoughtful Englishman, whose work keeps him much abroad and gives him unusual opportunities for observation and com­ parison. His affections are deepened by absence; but the very detachment which intensifies them widens also the range of his vision and imposes responsibilities of criticism, and sometimes of warning, from which home­ keeping patriots may be excused. It is from such preoccupations that the address here reprinted took shape. It was delivered at a peculiarly anxious moment in the evolution of our post-war foreign policy, when, oppressed by the multitude and urgency of new problems for which their minds were unprepared, too many seemed inclined to take refuge in an attitude of cowardly negation. If I republish it now, when that negative phase has passed, as I hope and believe for good, it is because, in the Foreign Secretary's own words, , Locarno is only a beginning '. For if Locarno represents a decisive turning-point in British policy, it represents also the definite ascendancy of certain processes of Continental thought and action to which reference is made in these pages. The ascendancy, but not the final consummation; for the Locarno docu­ ments on their technical side are singularly incomplete, and this incompleteness, with its resulting possibilities of A2 4 PREFACE uncertainty, deadlock, and even of breakdown, is due, as we must never forget, to the fixed attitude of the British government based, as has been repeatedly declared, upon the wishes of the British people-the Continental peoples, with one or two exceptions which it would be invidious to mention (exceptions moreover amenable to British influence), have not only accepted the new order but are ready to accept its natural consequences in the shape of obligations and organization. They are willing to i1tstitutional£ze their desire for peace. We, on the other hand, are still trying to make the best of both worlds, the old and the new. Hence the strange paradox that it is we, who like to think of ourselves as the peace­ makers, that have caused the Locarno settlement to be far less sweeping in its provisions for the compulsory settlement of disputes than in its provisions for security and sanctions. In the sphere of sanctions, indeed, we have committed ourselves to an interpretation of Article XVI of the Covenant which reproduces textually the relevant phrasing in the Geneva Protocol, thus demonstrating that our real objection to that document was against its arbitration provisions. If by dint of great goodwill and still greater ingenuity it has been possible for the statesmen of seven European countries to formulate their will for peace in a series of complicated local agreements, it is well that we should realize that, in the autumn as in the spring, it is we who are obstructing the development of a simpler and completer system. These remarks are not made in any cavilling spirit. Indeed, where the task has been rendered exceptionally difficult by limiting instructions, the merit of the successful negotiator is itself all the more exceptional. But at a moment when the way seems clear for other and perhaps even bolder efforts of international co-operation, PREFACE 5 it is important to recall that the intellectual difficulties between Britain and the Continent, enlarged upon in these pages, will still continue to confront us at every turn. Nor do I wish to suggest that, in the conflict between Continental systematization and British elasticity, the right is necessarily with our neighbours. No one has a keener sense than I of the value of our British experience and tradition, both in themselves and as an example to other peoples. But I hold that that experience and tradition are wrongly interpreted when it is suggested that they deter us from embodying their result either in general rules or in institutions. British history is in fact a record of periods of elasticity and experiment, periods when we 'kept our hands free' because we were' feeling our way', leading up to moments of definite constitutional achieve­ ment. To take but one single example: our long and not wholly fortunate period of 'feeling our way' in the sphere ofcolonial government was finally institutionalized, first in responsible government and then in the new system of equal partnership. The question before us is not one of choosing between a 'logical' system and 'illogical' compromises, but simply of deciding, on a careful study of the facts, whether or not the time has come for us to join with our associates in the League of Nations in the adoption of a new general rule-the abolition of the right of private war-and in devising the arrangements to make that rule effective. That there are risks involved I would be the last to deny. So there were in the policy of Lord Durham. But I believe that the risks of the more old-fashioned policy are far greater for all concerned, and particularly for ourselves: that, in fact, it exposes us to dangers which are already embarrassing British policy in more 6 PREFACE continents than one. And it will, I hope, be not one of the least advantages we draw from the Locarno settlement that it will leave us free to concentrate on those extra-European problems which will provide the real test both of the sincerity of our professions and of the working of post-war international institutions.

October 22, 1925. THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH IN THE POST-WAR WORLD

WHEN I was asked last November to address this meeting of the Oxford Branch of the International Universities League of Nations' Federation, I thought it would be a very delightful thing to be in Oxford in May. So it is; yet I find myself here this evening with very mingled feelings. For one thing, Oxford for me is peopled with ghosts. I ceased to teach here in 1909, four academic generations ago. That is a long time in the undergraduate life of a university, and a very considerable proportion of my pupils-and amongst them some of the most brilliant and one whom I trained to carryon my own teaching work-fell during the war. Oxford is full of their memories, and that is one reason why I have not been in Oxford so frequently in recent years. When I think of them I feel that they were unnecessary victims. Four fellows of New College fell as junior officers. They should never have gone as junior officers. I will not say that their sacrifice was wasted, but their service could have been better rendered under other conditions. They were victims of our wastefulness, of our lack of forethought. I remember how when Lord Milner came back from South Africa some twenty years ago he made what was for some of us an epoch-making speech at the New College Gaude, about the lesson of the South African War. He told us that the qualities of action, in which we British excelled, no longer sufficed, and that the need of the age for Britain was not action but thought. That lesson was never more needed than to-day. It is that lesson which our Federation-the Federation of which I am honorary president-is trying to drive home, because we believe that international politics can be studied in as scientific and scholarly a way as that History, Sir, which you adorn. After all, international politics 8 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH is only conte,mporary history, and the master of history, Thucydides, devoted himself to that branch of the subject. That is why we are organizing this summer in Geneva, courses of lectures and discussions on some of the main problems of the present-day world. We believe that Geneva is not only an administrative centre, but also, in virtue of that very fact, an educational centre. There is collected there the finest equipment and the most skilled personnel for the conduct of international politics that the world has ever known, and there is no reason at all why all this should not be used for educational purposes as well as for the purposes set forth in the Covenant. We also believe that the main reason for the estrangement and difficulties and misunderstandings between nations is to be sought not in the actual problems over which the dis­ agreements become manifest, but in the ignorance by nations of one another, of their institutions, their customs, their culture. We propose, therefore, to give a considerable place to interpretative studies of various nations and groups of nations. In the Secretariat and the Labour Office there are something like forty different nations represented in the persons of distinguished individuals, and many of them have expressed their willingness to speak about their own coun­ tries. Other speakers are coming from the United States and elsewhere to set forth their national history and institu­ tions in greater detail. This has been rendered possible by the organization that we have been able to set on foot in the United States. Public opinion in that country is now very greatly interested in Geneva. I will not say that the United States will join the League of Nations to-morrow; but it is certainly true that Americans are increasingly recognizing Geneva to be a great fact, something that has come to stay, and something which it behooves them to study as being the centre of world politics. Mr. Owen D. Young, whose name you know as one of the most prominent members of the Dawes Committee and the first Agent-General of Reparations, is Chairman of a committee in the United States which is rendering this educational enterprise possible. I had intended this evening to speak on the general ques- IN THE POST-WAR WORLD 9 tion of education in its international aspect, as suggested by this development of our work, because our Federation is strictly non-controversial. We exist simply to do educational work. But I have changed my mind. I have determined to be very controversial, speaking in my individual capacity as an Englishman who has been a great deal abroad and had many opportunities of addressing foreign audiences both in Europe and in the United States, and endeavouring to make them realize what we stand 'for as a nation and a Common­ wealth. I think perhaps you will allow me to say something this evening out of my own experience about the very serious dangers with which we are confronted. I am not going to speak about the situation in Europe. I am going to be brutally patriotic. I am going to consider our own British position, the position of this country and of the Empire in the conditions with which we are faced in this the seventh year after the end of the world war. I feel impelled to speak frankly because of the condition of public opinion as I find it after six months' absence from home. People, even people in high places, seem to have no conception at all of the way in which we have come to be regarded abroad. Weare passing through a dead season in our politics, but meanwhile the whole continent of Europe is in a buzz because of the callous way in which we are obstructing its processes of development. I am referring especially to the communication read by Mr. Chamberlain, on behalf of the British Cabinet, to the Council of the League of Nations at its meeting last March, explaining the reasons why Great Britain could not ratify the Geneva Protocol. It was an amazing document, both in its argu­ ments and in its conclusions. Personally, being of a prudent disposition, I had refused to believe that the Government would oppose a flat negative to the Protocol, because I did not think it credible that any British Government, of what­ ever political colour, would assume the responsibility of attempting to shatter the result ofsome five years' work done at Geneva, embodied in a scheme commended by the delegates of some fifty states. I am certain that if Lord Salisbury were at the Foreign Office to-day with all his natural caution, A3 10 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH that very caution would have prevented him from dealing with the Geneva Protocol in the reckless spirit of the present Government. There were a hundred possible courses between the method adopted and the signature and ratifica­ tion of the Protocol. Its summary and almost contemptuous rejection, accompanied by arguments which singularly recall those used by the German representive at the Second Hague Conference in 1907, has brought about an extremely grave situation in which we run the risk of being not merely intel­ lectually isolated-which has always been the case to some extent-but morally isolated as well. That is something which, except for very brief periods, we have never had to face before. One of the glories of our national history is that, individualistic as we are, utterly different in our outlook and our institutions from any other nation in the world, we have never had a coalition against us. We have always been on the side of the coalitions. To have a coalition aligned against us is, as we realized during the South African War, the greatest danger against which our statesmanship needs to be on its guard. We are courting that danger-the danger which Bismarck, not without reason, as the event showed, used to say cost him sleepless nights. Foreign nations are getting into the habit of regarding us much in the same way as they regarded Prussia in the years before the war. We are drifting into this situation through ignorance, through insularity-not through wickedness, but simply because we will not take the trouble to understand the problems for which our co-operation is needed. This problem of the Protocol-I am not going to discuss it in detail-has brought to a head a difficulty in our relations with the Continental peoples which has been implicit ever since the Covenant was issued. In fact, if I may speak sub­ jectively, in the language of some of the philosophers familiar to the Oxford mind, there is not one League of Nations but at least two. There is the League as conceived by ourselves and the League as conceived by the overwhelming majority of our fellow-members, and the two are poles apart. The distinction between them was not so evident so long as there were special problems, like reparations, cumbering the IN THE POST-WAR WORLD II ground. But as each particular difficulty is removed, the underlying differences become more clearly revealed. In the first years after the establishment of the League, we fell into a complacent habit of regarding it as something of British and American origin, associated as it was with the names of Lord Cecil and President Wilson, and we used to express pious hopes that the Continental nations would co-operate with us in giving it their confidence and support. It was in that spirit that our negotiations at Paris were con­ ducted which resulted in the drafting of the special British­ American guarantee treaty for France, in Article III ofwhich it is expressly stated that it will continue in force until the Council of the League, 'acting if need be by a majority, agrees that the League itself affords sufficient protection '. It could not be more clearly indicated that at that time, in 1919, we regarded the League as the mainspring of a new inter­ national order, but felt that France and other Continental nations, still wedded to less enlightened ideas, needed special measures of support during a transition period of apprentice­ ship in the new order. But in point of fact this whole conception is completely erroneous, as the subsequent evolution first of American and then of our more slow-witted British opinion has shown. The purpose behind the League-the idealistic impulse and aspiration-is indeed in line with our whole tradition, as with that of the United States. But the League itself as an instituHon is neither British nor American, but European. It is the consummation of a long development of Continental thought. If you look at the preamble of the Covenant you will find the distinction that I am making quite clearly marked. The purpose of the Covenant is 'to promote international co-opera­ tion and to achieve international peace and security '-this has a perfectly familiar sound to us, especially on Sundays. But the means adopted to achieve this purpose are not so familiar-compulsory settlement of disputes, improved diplo­ matic methods, I the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among

Governments', and I a scrupulous respect for all treaty 12 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH obligations.' We dislike compulsion, we dislike diplomacy, we dislike international law, and we dislike treaties. Yet the Covenant itself is nothing more than a glorified treaty. The record of plans for a League of Nations is almost exclusively Continental. It includes a Bohemian 'name, that of Podiebrad,. French names, those of Sully, the minister of Henry IV, Emeric Cruce, and the Abbe St. Pierre, and a German name, that of Kant. The only English name, an exception to prove the rule, is that of William Penn. The Holy Alliance itself, from which we were so glad to escape, is a forerunner of the League. This Continental tradition of constitution-making arises quite naturally from the conglom­ eration of sovereign states in a small area, and the constant warfare to which it gave rise. It was inevitable that clear­ sighted thinkers should seek to devise some organic inter­ national institution to render war impossible. Thus, ever since the break-up of the medieval unity of Christendom there has been a double thread running through the life of the Continent: the almost constant warfare producing its natural reaction in the projects of statesmen, philosophers, and jurists. Grotius penning his De Juri Pads et Belli in the midst of the Thirty Years War, is the best illustration of my point. This Continental tradition is not, in our usual sense of the word, idealistic. It is not ethical, still less is it religious. It is predominantly legal. The Continental, when he is advo­ cating a treaty of perpetual arbitration between, say, France and Germany, or between Czecho-Slovakia and Austria, does not claim that he is substituting love for hatred. His argu­ ment is much more matter-of-fact: 'Having lived for centuries under conditions of constant war and menace of war' he tells them, •you will find it far more convenient to enter into some firm arrangement to ensure stability and security.' Such a firm arrangement he sees in the Covenant. The Covenant­ not the Protocol but the Covenant-is to him a League for Mutual Protection, a substitution of law for war. This is Continental internationalism. I am not rating it high. It is not idealism. It is not applied Christianity. But it is a serious, genuine, practical movement. It is common IN THE POST-WAR WORLD not merely to the exposed states like Poland and France which, you may say, have a direct interest in that conception of the League, but also to states such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland, some of whom placed their conception of the League on record at the moment of their decision to join. What alarms me in the present situa­ tion is not so much that we are causing renewed anxiety, and thus delaying disarmament, among the exposed states, but that we are losing the support and sympathy of detached observers such as the ex-neutrals and the states of Latin America, whose opinion in our new post-war international society is by no means to be despised. To the representa­ tives of these countries our recent action signifies simply the reaffirmation of the old distinction between the Great Powers and the rest of the world-one law and one standard of conduct for the great, who will not submit to be judged by others, and another for the small, who may as well submit because they can always be coerced if they do not. Our own internationalism is something wholly different from that of the Continent. I can perhaps best illustrate it by recording an experience of my own. On a recent visit to the University of Prague I fell into conversation with a young Czech graduate in the Law School there. Discovering that I was British, he immediately remarked: I Would you mind answering a question which has caused us a great deal of per­ plexity? Is it really true that England has no written con­ stitution ?' When I assured him this was so he thanked me

and added: I I had thought it could not possibly be true. One of our professors made the statement in a lecture, but some of us concluded that he must be mistaken. So one of us wrote to the British Prime Minister to ask if it was true; his secretary replied that it was, but still we did not credit it. For how in the world do you know what to do in a consti­ tutional emergency?' Many of you no doubt dislike the Protocol, and perhaps with some reason, because it is a rigid and complicated docu­ ment laying down exact provisions for every possible con­ tingency. But this Continental could not imagine how the political system of his or any other country could work 14 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH without a written document for guidance. He had no con­ ception whatever of what we mean by precedent, tradition, convention, on which not only our political but our legal system is built up. No wonder it is easier for him than for us to understand a document like the Covenant which is nothing less (little though we realize it as yet) than a written constitution covering the conduct of the most important part of our national affairs. We realized it in fact so little, that we accepted it, after the briefest of debates in the House of Commons, without any consideration whatever of what its acceptance involved tor us. Our British tradition of internationalism is, in fact, some­ thing of a totally different character. It is ethical, humani­ tarian, religious; and being religious it is personal and subject to the fluctuations of personal desire and aspiration. It is an attempt to do our duty to our neighbours in the world of states, but to do it in our own way, in our own time, and according to our own inclination. We have a long and honourable record of international action-from Oliver Cromwell's intervention on behalf of the persecuted Walden­ sian Protestants in Piedmont, down to Bulgarian, Armenian, Congo, and other agitations of recent years and generations. Vie have constantly made our moral authority felt in all parts of the world, but not in response to the obligations of a written document. The mandate article of the Covenant is only the embodiment of habits and principles of government worked out by us experimentally in India and elsewhere. We have been experimental, independent, self-willed, some­ times even mystical in our practical efforts of internationalism; and mystics, as the Continent is realizing, are not the easiest kind of people to work with. Take one special sphere in which we have displayed our international creed in action. We are told byjournalists, and sometimes even by ministers, who, being Oxford men, ought to know better, that it is a terrible thought that the British Navy should be called upon to carry out international tasks. But what has the British Navy been engaged upon for the last three centuries and more but work of this character? Who else but the British Navy broke down the claims of IN THE POST·WAR WORLD Spain and Portugal dividing between them the monopoly of the Americas? Who else kept the seas open for the trade and exploration of all nations? Who else swept the seas clear of the slave-trade, so that its victims all the world over came to regard the Union Jack as the symbol of liberty? All this was international work carried on in pursuance of a deliberate international policy, often in the face of great diplomatic difficulty, not least with the government of the United States. Yet we persisted in it because we believed it was right-but not because we had put ourselves under a legal obligation to do so. Our naval history is a history of work carried out for the world: if it had not been so, if, for instance, we had used it during the nineteenth century to block the access of other nations to overseas markets, the world would never have tolerated our naval supremacy. The conception of the British Navy as an instrument to be used purely for self-regarding purposes is a product of the re­ actionary moment through which we are passing. It is not the Protocol, but the opponents of the Protocol, who are in this respect falsifying our national tradition.l

1 For the history of our disputes with the United States in connexion with the suppression of the Slave Trade, see the Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, vol. ii, chap. 6. The new view about the function of the Navy, assimilating it to that of the Prussian army before the war, is well summarized in the following extract from a recent speech by the Secretary of State for the Colonies: 'Another scheme which they (the Government) had had to consider was a well-meaning but exceedingly fatuous one, by which this country would have been com­ pelled to intervene in whatever quarrel arose in any part of the world, and which would have had the effect of putting our Navy in pawn for everybody else's purposes instead of keeping it, as we should, to maintain the security and strength of the British Empire for its own sake and for the sake of the part which it had always played in con­ tributing to the peace of the world.' There is, of course, nothing new in the idea that the Empire on which the sun never sets is necessarily interested in 'whatever quarrel arises in any part of the world'. It has repeatedly been affirmed by British statesmen, notably by Mr. Lloyd George on the occasion of the Agadir incident. What is new is, firstly, the obligation to be interested in a breach of the peace, and secondly, the distinction drawn by Mr. Amery between' everybody else's purposes' and the self-regarding purpose assigned by him for the Navy. But note how, speaking before a popular audience, he felt it necessary to blur 16 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH Another illustration of the way in which we have been experimental pioneers of the Covenant is afforded by the dispute clauses (Articles XII to XV), which embody the kind of procedure we have worked out in our own British League of Nations, as, for instance, in the commission appointed some years ago to tide over a dispute between India and South Africa. But obligatory equal co-operation with foreign nations is something new for us; it is contrary to our traditions, con· trary to our habits, and extremely distasteful, as is abun­ dantly evident, in small things as in great, at the Geneva meetings. Our relationship with foreign nations has, in fact, throughout our history been of almost every other kind except equal co-operation! We have fought with foreigners, we have traded with them, we have governed them. We have sent out administrators to civilize them and missionaries to convert them. But we have not been in the habit of sitting round a table with them on equal terms and pooling our ideas with theirs. I remember how incongruous I felt the position to be last September, when we invoked Article XI to resolve a strained situation which had arisen on the Iraq frontier with Turkey. There, confronting one another, were Lord Parmoor, representing the great British Empire, Fethi Bey, representingthe relativelyinsignificantTurkish Republic, and Mr. Branting, representative of another small state, Sweden, dealing with the matter on behalf of the Council of the League. Does this precedure involve a diminution of our dignity? Or does it rather, as I believe, .involve its enhancement? Whatever you may think, it is a procedure to which we committed ourselves when we signed the Covenant. The very titles suggest the difference between the British and Continental conception. j Societe des Nations' implies a community of states, whereas the term' League' suggests rather a common crusade aga£nst something. The French equivalent for Covenant is simply j pacte " a colourless legal this sinister distinction by adding a vaguely idealistic clause at the end of his definition. (Speech at Cannon Street Hotel, reported in The Daily Tilegrapll, June I3, I925, page 8.) IN THE POST·WAR WORLD 17 term, whereas I Covenant' was chosen by President Wilson, with his Scotch-Irish ancestry, in order to invest the whole document with a semi-religious significance. I repeat, it is the existence of these two different attitudes of mind, of these two different Leagues of Nations, which is the real difficulty of the present international situation. We in Britain are in a false position because, although our motives may be ethically superior to those of other nations, we have committed ourselves to a system and a machinery the nature of which we have never realized, largely, I fear, because our statesmen, who naturally dislike expounding disagreeable truths, have not helped us to realize it. The result is a dead­ lock, involving, as I said at the beginning, a very distasteful situation for us, with grave possibilities on the horizon. It is not for me to propose a solution of the deadlock. I only wished to make it clear in order to bring home the fact that the problem before us is really in the intellectual rather than in the political sphere, and that in the long run the situation must be sought in the field of education. But it will be said: 'Where is the deadlock, and where is the danger? What need is there for us to go back upon our traditional habits? Why not go on as before, whether foreign nations like it or not?' The answer to this line of argument is simple. We are not strong enough to follow such a policy. Weare not strong enough to stand up to the world and say, I We have our own way of doing things, and if you do not like it we will play by ourselves '. Our isolationists, who would have us quit the League of Nations, or reduce it to insignificance from within, simply do not know the facts of the world in which they are living. Let us consider for a few moments the changes that have come about in the international position of the British Empire since the war. In the first place, we are face to face with a new Europe, and a Europe that is rapidly drawing together into a single system. Do not believe the people who tell you that the feuds of the Continent are eternal. It is not true. The wounds of Europe are healing. The Continent is discovering its econo­ mic unity, and through economic unity it" will move on 18 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH towards political unity. What has been the great obstacle in the way of that unity? It has been the fact that there were two rival theories fighting for predominance on the Continent-the principle of autocracy and the processes set in motion by the French Revolution. So long as autocracy was the ,majority principle in the life of Europe, no unity was possible. The difference of outlook was too funda­ mental. Bismarck spent his life in contending against what he always called 'the principles of the Revolution '. But those principles, whose dynamic force he always felt beneath the surface of European politics, triumphed throughout the Continent in 1918, not least in Germany. Europe up to the borders of Russia is to-day democratic. There are exceptions here and there, as in Spain and Hungary, but substantially the ideas of 1789 have triumphed-with the result that the one great underlying obstacle to the unity of the European peoples has been removed. There have been two striking instances quite recently of the change in European public opinion. The first is the German presidential election. People who do not read the newspapers carefully might easily have concluded that the election of Field-Marshal von I-Iindenburg was due to chau­ vinistic feelings aroused by the continued occupation of the Rhine and the Ruhr. Such an idea is completely dispelled by an examination of the distribution of the votes, which is a psychological phenomenon of the greatest interest. Through­ out the occupied area, from Holland to Switzerland, Hinden­ burg polled only one-third of the votes. His majority was drawn entirely from the interior, from districts, including strongly Socialistic areas like Saxony, and Catholic districts like Bavaria, where no foreign soldiers have been quartered. The constituencies in which his more conciliatory opponent secured his majority were, with the exception of two working­ class districts in or near Berlin, all of them frontier regions, including Upper Silesia. That does not mean that the Germans in Silesia love the Poles or that the inhabitants of the occupied area love the French. But it does mean that economic forces are beginning to assert themselves, and that passion is giving way to common sense. Once the play IN THE POST·WAR WORLD 19 of interests is set in motion, it can bring about startling changes. A second instance concerns that area of Teschen, about which a British Premier once boasted his ignorance. After the Armistice the Poles and the Czechs came to blows over that important coal-field, and much bitter feeling was aroused. The other day Poland and Czecho-Slovakia signed a treaty of perpetual friendship and arbitration. Why? Because experience had convinced public opinion in both countries that they had common interests which outweigh their local rivalries and enmities. Europe is, in fact, becoming stabilized, and the clearest indication of this was the adoption of the Geneva Protocol last September and the spirit which pervaded the discussions that preceded it. The Protocol represents the bridging of the gulf that has hitherto divided the advocates of security and the advocates of disarmament, or, to speak more plainly, France and the Little Entente on the one hand, and the ex· neutrals on the other. The unanimity with which the Pro· tocol was accepted was not simply formal. It was the result of a new spirit among the delegates-a spirit which our own delegates were unhappily given no opportunity to communi­ cate to their fellow·countrymen. The policy of the Protocol, which is the inevitable common policy of the progressive parties on the Continent, has come to stay. It will un­ doubtedly win through-either with us or without us. The second new fact is that the centre of the British Empire is no longer an island. It has become part of Europe. The twenty miles that separate us from the Conti­ nent have become ten minutes in an aeroplane. Our people are slow to realize the momentous consequences - both strategic and political, involved by this new physical relation· ship. For a thousand years and more we have been pro­ tected by the surrounding water and for the latter part of that time by a supreme navy. To·day the problem of security is opened up for us: it is as much our problem as it is that of our Continental neighbours. Weare strategically in as great danger to·day as the people of eastern France were 111 1914. 20 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH For what do these new inventions which have linked us to the Continent signify? A development in the art of war which has made physical security unattainable. As Sir Hugh Trenchard has recently indicated, the only way to attain security is to abolish the air. The long competition between the offensive and the defensive which we can trace in the history of the art of war, has been decided-and, as it would seem, definitively-in favour of the offensive. War, in fact, as a human agency, has developed beyond human control. The next war will be simply a massacre-a massacre mainly of civilians, and of civilians on both sides. In these circum­ stances preparedness, in the old sense of the word, has become morally and technically impossible. Security, physically unattainable, must be sought in a state of mind­ in other words by increased co-operation and confidence among those whom science has made close neighbours. Thirdly, we are no longer supreme at sea. It is most painful to have to realize this, so painful that most of us shrink from the thought that Britannia no longer rules the waves. And yet it is so. At the Imperial Conference of 1921 we decided that we would acquiesce in what was euphemistically described as a 'one-power standard' in comparison with the United States, and the Washington Agreement was arrived at a few months later upon the same basis. In theory this means that no other navy is stronger than ours; but in practice it would seem to leave us at a disadvantage compared with the United States, because we have far larger and more scattered commitments. Whereas the United States naval staff has merely to consider the Atlantic and the Pacific, with the Panama Canal to unite them, we have to face the possibility of operations which may require our fleet to be divided between the North Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Far East; for after the events of July, 1914, nobody is going to be so foolish as to imagine that the scope of the next war will be limited to a small part of our continent. This idea of dividing Europe-itself a small continent-into zones and declaring that our own interests are confined to the area west of the Rhine seems to me, if I may say so with all respect, simply childish. It is IN THE POST·WAR WORLD 21 the result of seven years of statesmanship in which our leaders have been afraid to tell the nation disagreeable truths. There are only two alternatives. One is to put all our weight into the policy of outlawing war as an international crime; the other is to face the strategic realities of the post­ war world conceived in pre-war terms. And among these strategic realities is the danger of a coalition that will strike at us simultaneously in Western Europe and in the Pacific. To say that the frontier of Poland matters as much to us as the frontier of France is an understatement. There are frontiers and coasts far farther from London than the Polish corridor which matter to us quite as much. You cannot draw a line at the Rhine or even at the Urals. Nor can you rule out this or that nation from the list of possible enemies. If we are to organize on Prussian lines, let us do so thoroughly and with our eyes open, and not according to a formula which will tide over trouble among an unthinking electorate. I must apologize for this excursion into Real· politik, but Mr. Chamberlain's memorandum invited it. But, it will be said, if our navy is not equal to its duties, let us increase it. You know the answer. We cannot afford it. With our naval supremacy has departed our industrial supremacy. To come back to this country after a stay in the United States is to feel that our industrial system needs overhauling from top to bottom. What is the root cause of the chronic unemployment which hangs like a blight over our country and for which all parties in the State seek in vain for a remedy? There are plenty of secondary causes­ shrinkage of markets due to the war, loss of our inherited advantages, the development of protectionist systems else­ where. But the root cause, which has prevented us from grappling successfully with these difficulties, is very simple. It is lack of intelligence. Those engaged in the production process in its various grades do not compare as favourably as they should with their competitors across the Atlantic. And the reason for that is again very simple. It is not that we have not the brains-we are not nearly so stupid as we often seem to the rest of the world--·but that we are not 22 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH a social democracy and therefore do not employ to the best advantage the brains we have. The social divisions of our country-our inherited English I class traditions' and pre­ judices-are thwarting our progress at every point. Less than nine per cent. of our primary school scholars pass to the secondary school. Remember that figure and bring it into relation with our J,200,ooo unemployed. Ninety-one per cent. of our children leave school at fourteen and receive no further whole-time education. Our leaders must be picked, with rare exceptions, from the remaining nine per cent. Coupled with that is the evil of hereditary businesses -important positions in the industrial and commercial world passing from father to son without either special training or special merit. The United States is a country of vast natural resources, but it has never acquired our feudal habit of rely­ ing on the hereditary principle for its industrial and com­ mercial leadership. One of the richest men in the United States has sent his son to serve behind the counter of a I department store' in a comparatively small town because he felt that in this way he would acquire a greater all-round business experience. Several of my own Cornell students went straight from their final examination to menial tasks on the lowest rung of the industrial ladder. It sounds un· imaginable, I know, for an Oxford man to serve the furnace in a steel plant. But Americans do not think in terms of the same social values. Nor, let me add, do Canadians and Australians. Our inherited English mode of living is causing a widening breach between ourselves and the overseas Dominions. Those who left us to go abroad under the British flag often did so just in order to escape from the class-divisions of the old country. How should they or their children, born into a less caste-ridden society, feel as much at home as they feel, for instance, in the United States? There is a fundamental difference of rhythm between life in England and life in the Dominions. Some of them have already set themselves against hereditary titles, and even against other marks of distinction associated with our English social system. These are but surface indications of a difference which not all our IN THE POST·WAR WORLD 23 charm and hospitality can bridge over. There is only one way in which we can keep in step with the Dominions and that is by becoming more of a social democracy ourselves. Adopt a common system of schooling for all classes and increase that nine per cent. figure four or five fold, and you might yet check the steady loss of contact between ourselves and the young democracies overseas. I have passed from the new world in which the Empire finds itself to the new conditions in the Empire itself. The British Commonwealth of Nations, as it is officially de­ scribed in the Irish Treaty, is something very different from the British Empire of pre-war days. Ten years ago the Dominions, although described as self-governing, were not in fact self-governing communities. They did not control their foreign affairs. To-day they are independent members of the League of Nations, with a right to separate representa­ tion on the Council. And now when Canada has something to say about the Protocol she sends it direct to Geneva. Obviously this new situation is creating very difficult con­ stitutional problems. I will not touch upon them now except to make one observation. Do not follow the facile habit of those who preach the doctrine that loyalty to the Crown is a sufficient cement of the Commonwealth. The new royalism is sometimes preached in quarters that are rather suspect. To limit the connexion between the different British communities to a mere personal tie - however sincerely felt-is to provide the Dominions with the status that Holland occupied under William and Mary and Han­ over under the Georges. Our Commonwealth, if it is to survive and to mean something, must be based on something more permanent and organic than attachment to an indi­ vidual, a family, or a dynasty. It will not be easy to preserve the unity of the Common­ wealth in the new post-war age. Remember that there are practically no special common interests between the different parts of the Empire. Look at the map, study the facts and statistics in a commercial geography, and then try to discover the interests common, say, to Great Britain, Canada, and India. The whole history of Canada has been a struggle to 24 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH maintain economic independence and the political connexion with us in spite of the powerful attraction of the United States. Talk about the artificial frontiers in Europe cutting across natural economic regions! There is no frontier in Europe that for artificiality can approach the frontier between the Maritime Provinces and New England, or between Manitoba and Minnesota, or between British Columbia and the state of Washington. No, let us stop this talk about common interests, because if you put the argument for imperial unity on that plane, the communities of the Common­ wealth will look to countries with whom they really have interests in common. Let us face the fact that our interests are and must remain fundamentally divergent. There is nothing dangerous in that, or in the phenomenon that the seven British votes are often cast on opposite sides at Geneva. What unites us, and the only thing that can con­ tinue to unite us, is not community ot interests but com­ munity of principles and ideals. Let me mention another new element in the imperial situation. We have gone back since the war upon our traditional commercial policy. Ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, when we swept away the last vestiges of the Old Colonial System, we have stood for the Open Door in our dependent empire, and the British Navy has kept the seas open for the traders of all nations. Since the war we have slipped back into eighteenth-century habits. We have adopted the principle of Colonial Preference not simply in our dealings with the self-governing Dominions, but for imports from the Crown Colonies and in the tariffs of the Crown Colonies themselves. Preference to the self-govern­ ing Dominions is not a matter of principle; it is a matter of expediency. So long as Czecho-Slovakia claims the right to give a preference to Poland, there can be no objection in principle to preference between the British member states of the League of Nations, although personally I regard preferences in themselves as objectionable and contrary to Point III of the Fourteen Points. I am also of opinion that preferences between individual Dominions and Great Britain would be more satisfactory to both parties if they were IN THE POST-WAR WORLD embodied in proper commercial treaties instead of being concluded, as at present, as part of an informal bargain which may be reversed by public opinion at any moment. But this is a side issue. Preference to or in the Crown Colonies is something wholly different-a reactionary policy which formed no part of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain's campaign for Imperial Preference, and which must range the public opinion of the whole world, and most of all of the United States (the country most dependent on free access to in­ dustrial raw materials), against our economic imperialism. This policy, which dates (with minor exceptions) from 1919, has been developed quietly, one might almost say stealthily, by the Colonial Office, and has excited practically no com­ ment in this country. It is now an established principle that the tariff schedules of our Crown Colonies should favour British as against foreign traders, and differential export duties on industrial raw materials are also admitted. But if certain British interests have benefited by this new departure, as by the somewhat similar rubber-restriction scheme, the country as a whole has paid dear, for it has confirmed public opinion in the United States in its belief that we draw vast treasure and tribute from our empire, and strengthened it in its determination that we can and must pay them our debts. The best way to convince Americans that they are mistaken in their ingrained prejudice against British imperialism is to stop advertising Wembley as an exhibition of 'our imperial estate' and (heaven save the mark 1) as a 'University of Empire', and to sweep away every vestige of preference and monopoly from our ad­ ministration of the dependent empire. Then, and not till then, will our after-dinner speeches at British-American banquets carry conviction across the Atlantic. Not that I would have it thought that, even if this desirable consummation came about, I would look for the way out of our difficulties through a British-American alliance. We hear a good deal in these days of the bond between 'the English-speaking peoples '. No one is a sincerer advocate than I of a better understanding between Great Britain and the United States-an understanding, let me say, which must 26 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH be based on perfect equality, without patronage or con­ descension on either side. But an exclusive political associa­ tion is something very different. I dislike all exclusive political relationships between the British Commonwealth and outside states, whether within or without the League of Nations. They are contrary to our interests as a world-wide Commonwealth, and certainly also in our case contrary to the spirit of our relationship with our fellow-members of the League as a whole. And an exclusive British-American relationship I regard as one of the most dangerous ideas abroad in our political circles at the present time. I see indications of it constantly, even in the speeches of ministers. I wish that some one with more authority than myself would give it the coup de grace. For such a notion is, in the first place, impossible of realization; and, in the second place, even if it could be realized, it would be disastrous for ourselves. It cannot be realized because the people of the United States will never sanction a special political arrangement with anyone European nation. Europe for them is a single whole. If the President attempted to secure special favours for Great Britain he would have against him the combined vote of all those with special sympathies for other European countries-the French vote, the German vote, the Italian vote, the Slav vote, and so on. Never forget that time and the birthrate are making the United States steadily less English. Our association with the United States can never be exclusive; it can only be as part of a general policy and system embodying the very real ideals and principles which we hold in common. Let us look steadily to that, rather than to Nordic ancestry or the gold standard, as the tie which unites us. But supposing that the people of the United States could be induced to make a special political arrangement with us, it would be of evil augury for our Commonwealth. For, things being as they are, the natural basis of such an arrangement would be opposition to the non-white peoples. It would be an alliance not of the English-speaking peoples but of the white English-speaking peoples (with a few non- IN THE POST-WAR WORLD 27 English speakers included) against the claims, or supposed claims, of colour. What would happen to India in such an event? How would Indian public opinion react towards such a constellation? And what of Africa? To ask these questions is to realize that the alignment of white versus non-white is the very contingency which it is the main function of the British Commonwealth of Nations in this twentieth century to avert. It would be to reconstitute, on a far larger and more disastrous scale, the scale not of a Continent but of the whole world, the discredited old system of balance of power, with India holding the balance. Do not imagine that I am talking of remote eventualities. Events and currents of opinion in the post-war world move with lightning rapidity, confounding those traditions of slow evolution which we have all imbibed from the study of our own island history. I realized this with a shock during the debate on the Japanese Amendment at the Assembly last September. That debate, bringing into the foreground as it did, what everyone knew to be a vital issue, plunged the temple of peace for one evening into an atmosphere of tense anxiety, recalling the eve of the war in 1914. The delegates, it is true, were calm, collected, and courteous; it was the spectators who manifested their excitement. As I was walk­ ing out of the room, when the debate had been adjourned to be continued in private session, an American lady re­ marked to me with evident feeling, 'Well, you British can feel that you have the United States with you'. To which

I am afraid I replied with some asperity, I My dear lady, you are forgetting that only one out of every seven of the subjects of King George has a white face'. She was very angry, both at the rejection of her proffered help and at my statistics. But they were accurate, and let us never forget them. Such, in brief outline, are the conditions with which our Commonwealth is faced in the post-war world. How best can it deal with them? I see one policy and one policy only that can avert the disintegration of the Commonwealth and the disasters that this would entail for the world. That policy is to support and develop the League of Nations. 28 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH No power in the world stands more in need of the League than we. It affords the only way out of the dilemma in which we were involved by the development of Dominion sovereignty. The Dominions have already claimed the right (over the Chanak incident and in Canada's stand over Article X) to decide for themselves the issues of peace and war. London cannot bind them to a common foreign policy. But Geneva can. The promise which on September 16, 1922, Canada and Australia refused to give to London they had already, by their signature of the Covenant, given to Geneva. The supreme British political interest is peace; and peace is safeguarded, and must be further safeguarded, by the League. The supreme British constitutional interest is an organization which will prevent our scattered Dominions (which must in process of time become even more numerous and more scattered) from being attracted into separate orbits. Such an organization is provided by the League. If the League had not been brought into existence as a result of the war, it would have been needed for the problems of our own Empire. It is the deus ex machina of the Br:itish Commonwealth of Nations. If it breaks down, or remains a mere secondary organization, without international signifi­ cance or real moral authority, the British Commonwealth will assuredly break down also. For those who cannot see this-and there are many such in our Government offices­ I would recommend, not a trip to Geneva but a trip round the world. But, you will ask, if the League is the solution of our difficulties, constitutional, racial, and economic, if the problems of Dominion status, of white versus non-white, of access to raw materials, are to be settled in and through the atmosphere and organization of Geneva, what is the use of the Empire anyway? Am.r not simply providing it with a dignified funeral? Will it not be absorbed in the larger international community? My answer is emphatically, No. The British Empire, re-christened as the British Commonwealth of Nations, will survive in the post-war world because it has special work to do, as it has had special work to do in the past. It will IN THE POST-WAR WORLD survive because it embodies certain common political prin­ ciples, a certain outlook or, if you will, a philosophy of politics which finds new spheres of application in the problems of each successive age. In the nineteenth century we stood for the principle of trusteeship of backward peoples, for the development of responsible government in our colonies, for the open door and the freedom of the seas. These principles have been embodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations. We have but to watch over their execution and development and to ensure that there is no backsliding. But a new age calls upon us to face new problems in the light of our traditional philosophy. This pioneering work which the world needs us to do for it is, as it seems to me, along three lines. The first is the question of racial equality. On that great principle-one of the most far-reaching, as it is also one of the most obvious, applications of Christianity-we should take our stand without hesitation and ambiguity. All men are equal in the sight of God. All men are equal under the British flag. All men are entitled to equal respect as human beings. I know that, stated bluntly in this way, the doctrine of racial equality excites political opposition and physiological prejudice. Such opposition and prejudice are generally, in my experience, the products of intellectual confusion rather than of lack of Christian charity. The doctrine of racial equality is confused with the policy of unrestricted migration. The two are wholly distinct. It is right and proper for every independent community to decide for itself the composition of its own population. No people is more jealous of this right than the Japanese. But that has no bearing on the principle that a human being, be he white, yellow, black, or brown, is equally entitled to liberty and justice, the benefits which human government exists to provide, and that the society of nations knows no distinctions between states on the score of the colour or race of their inhabitants. When we speak of sex-equality we do not mean that there are no differences between men and women, or that such differences should not become the subject of legislative action. We only mean 30 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH that there should not be one standard of values, one set of weights and measures, for men and another for women. And that is all that is meant when we speak of racial equality. Racial equality, in that sense, you may say, is a self· evident proposition. It follows from the fact that the League of Nations has admitted India, China, Japan, Siam, Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, and San Domingo on equal terms. But the fact remains that the non-white peoples do not consider it so. In 1919 Japan made strenuous efforts to get a definite reference to racial equality inserted, not in the body of the Covenant (on which it might have been possible to base a legal argument on some question of policy) but in the preamble. The British Empire opposed her, and though the Japanese proposition was carried in a vote, President Wilson ruled that it required unanimity. I would like to see that amendment of the preamble re-introduced on the initiative of the seven British members. I recommend the suggestion to the British premier for the next Imperial Conference. I know that it will require moral courage to push it through. That is j list why it is worth doing. The prejudice that is evoked by such a suggestion is the raw material of the next war-the inter-racial war, the war that haunts every careful student of international politics. And what a war! Can you imagine any more futile conflict? To fight over a coal-field or an oil-deposit may be ignoble; but there is a modicum of sense in it. But to fight another nation over a question of pigmentation is to go right behind the religious wars of the Middle Ages back to the Age of Darkness. It is a war between two species of human animals-a war to kill, because conversion is physically impossible. Our second task is to work out the implications of inter­ national economic co-operation. The causes of war in the twentieth century are not so much territorial as economic. They centre round the problem of industrial raw material, with particular reference to the exploitation of the Tropics. This is, as I have already indicated, a British Empire problem; but it is also a League of Nations problem, and IN THE POST·WAR WORLD the body concerned with it in that capacity is the Financial and Economic Committee. Keep your eyes on that Com· mittee. It will not be long before it, or a more powerful successor, becomes a centre of controversy. The Socialist Movement-on the Continent at any rate­ has at length thoroughly realized that you cannot redress the more fundamental evils of the capitalist system by laws passed through national parliaments. It is an international system, and it must be subjected to investigation and, if necessary, treatment on an international scale. That is one reason why we may expect an ever-growing interest in the League on the part of the Socialist parties. This is wholly desirable from every point of view, even that of the timid Conservative. For to work for economic reform in and through the League means to replace the controversies and embittering divisions of the past by a new and more con· structive outlook, and to ensure that the problems of the economic system are examined in a scientific and reo sponsible spirit by the representatives of all the various groupings and interests concerned. The last and most difficult task before our Commonwealth is to make men realize the nature of nationality-to teach them that nationality is not political but something far deeper, which belongs to the realm of the poets and the artists. When that lesson has been truly learned, one of the most potent causes of war will have been removed because demagogy will have been deprived of its most convenient weapon-the popular passion of patriotism. And here we English can in all good conscience take the lead, because if there is one adjective of nationality which is devoid of political and governmental significance, and is therefore peculiarly intimate, it is the word' English '. We are in this respect-and it is a very important respect-the most civi­ lized people in the world, because we have evolved a special word 'British' to connote our political institutions. That distinction between the things that are common and uni­ versal, and the things that are sacred and of the hearth, between the realm of Martha and the realm of Mary, bears the coinage of our special genius, a genius which, because 32 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH it is displayed in action which embodies thought rather than in the formulation of thought itself, we are too often inclined to disclaim! No, in spite of the (lost causes' that slumber in these rafters, there is in this place the spring of progress. Our England is perplexed and discouraged, but she is not decadent; and she can still receive the impulse for which she is wont to look to Oxford. Let it be Oxford's mission to study these problems, to apply to them the full measure of her criticism and her insight, and to set in motion the movement which will help our country and Empire to solve the problems which beset us. I have spoken too long. I ask your pardon both for my prolixity and for my frankness. But I have spoken out of a full mind and a full heart, because I felt I could say no less.