II

PROGRESSION FROM PROXIMATE TO ULTIMATE IN THE CAUSES OF THE WAR

IN ALL SOCIOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL studies we frequently, if not always, find that out of small beginnings arise great things. The murder of the Austrian Archduke and his consort led to this world war. As there is the logic of numbers and of thought, so is there the logic of events. The true student and philosopher is bound to link up this logic of events with the logic of thought, and thus to arrive at ultimate truth. We shall find that the smaller and narrower desires, motives and ideas which force mankind to immediate action, lead us on to greater and wider ideas, to basic principles of human motives and human action, of which the immediate manifestations, that are at first most prominent and limit our horizon of vision and experience, are merely the surface symptoms. The real and efficient causes which led to such actions are to be found deeper down in human nature; they are thus common to all the human beings partaking of this nature, and, in a wider range of human activity, they direct the collective action of great nations and of alliances of States.

These considerations emphatically apply to the history of this great war. The more we consider it in all its aspects, the more thoroughly we pursue the logic of events and of human motives from the more immediate to the more ultimate causes, the more shall we find that the logic of events step by step forces us on from the immediate causes of official State-action down to the common basic principles of human psychology in individual man and in the collective psychology of the people who constitute the State and the nation.

ASSASSINATION OF THE ARCHDUKE. AUSTRIA AND SERBIA

For the purposes of this essay, we need not enter into the detailed account or discussion of the political causes which led to the war and to the first stages of its prosecution. These questions have been subjected to abundant and searching inquiry and are, or ought to be, the common property of all thoughtful and unprejudiced people among belligerents and neutrals. But, in the light of our inquiry, it must be pointed out that we cannot accept, and remain satisfied with, the explanation of this most momentous event in the world’s history, by the enumeration of its more proximate causes, such as, in the first instance, the assassination of the Archduke, or, in the second instance, the struggle between the powerful Austrian Empire and the small Serbian Kingdom leading to the attempted suppression of Serbian independence and national development, which was regarded by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as threatening its own inner national security and the legitimate expansion of its power.

TEUTON AND SLAV. GERMAN WELTPOLITIK

Driven still further afield, we may realise that the war was, with some justice, regarded as the struggle between Teuton and Slav, represented on the one hand by the powerful German Empire and on the other by the equally powerful Russian Czardom. The moment Germany is introduced it becomes clearly manifest to all competent students of contemporary politics that the real aggressive factor in this war is, and has been for years, the German Empire and its national aspirations. We are driven far beyond the struggle of Slav and Teuton interests in the south-east of Europe to the proper estimate of the influence of Pan-German Weltpolitik, which affects practically every established State and nationality in the civilised world with whose actual possessions and existence these aspirations must conflict and into whose national existence and security they enter.

DEFENCE OF SMALLER NATIONALITIES

But before leaving the immediate and original focus of the war at its beginning, i.e. the Balkan States in the south-east of Europe, a new and wider principle of universal policy obtrudes itself on the consciousness of the whole world involved in the struggle, namely, the principle of the independence and the right of existence of the smaller nationalities and States. The Balkans have been the most typical and illustrative centres for the actual and practical application of the principles governing smaller nationalities. On the other hand, it is a grave mistake to believe that they furnish the clearest exposition of these principles, because these several Balkan States, as regards the question of nationality, are so far from clearly defining it, that, on the contrary, they produce the most confusing tangle in the perception of the idea of nationality itself. Race, language, religion, topographical configuration of the country in relation to these and to what are called political boundaries, past history, present politics, commercial and industrial interests—all are merged and intertwined, unite and conflict in such a highly confusing degree that the attempt at a definition of a nation and a State presents in these districts the most insuperable difficulties.

The nature and claims of these smaller Balkan States make it therefore almost impossible for us to arrive at a clear conception of what we mean by “the smaller nationalities” in this connection for the maintenance of which in their integrity we are thus prepared to fight. The principle of nationality as underlying the moral justification for the existence of the several Balkan States, which were formerly wholly, and recently partially, under the domination of the Turkish Empire, cannot be the same as the political and moral justification for the solidarity and the independence of, for instance, Switzerland, Belgium or Canada, not to mention many greater States. These smaller nations and States, as now constituted and politically developed for many generations, are made up of two or more races, which can be clearly distinguished on ethnological grounds and which differ in language and religion. The sense in which the term and the concept “nationality” are frequently, if not generally, used as a moral and political claim for the solidarity and independence of the State, can certainly not be applied in these cases. Yet there can be no doubt that we should all be ready to fight in support of the independence of these States if they were threatened by one of the “expanding” greater Powers. Do we really sympathise, and are we justified in sympathising with, the so-called “national” claims and ensuing sanguinary conflicts of the Greeks, the Bulgars, the Serbians, the Wallachians or Roumans, the Albanians, and the Mohammedan Turkish residents in these several countries? Is it a sufficient guide to sanguinary antagonism to count how many people in each district speak the Greek language or one of the differing branches of the Slav tongue or the Roumanian, Albanian or Turkish languages, how many worship in the several differing churches or attend the schools attached to them which correspond to these several “national subdivisions,”—not to enter into the most confusing and doubtful inquiries with regard to their racial, ethnological origin? And having counted and constituted a doubtful majority of one element over the other, is this enough to justify the most heinous persecution and constantly recurring murders of individuals or of collective bodies throughout the Balkans for so many years preceding this war? Surely the cause of freedom and justice rests upon other, vastly different and far securer foundations than these!

Nevertheless, whatever the claims for national freedom and development of each one of these several so-called nationalities in that part of the world may be, one fact, however, emerges clearly from the conflict; namely, that their larger and more powerful neighbours, simply because of their greater bulk and power, have no right to rob them of their independence and to absorb them into their own body politic. This moral and political conviction of civilised mankind has grown still firmer and clearer when, in view of the professed aims of Pan-German militarists, it became abundantly clear that the national existence of peaceful and highly developed smaller Western European States, firmly established in their independence through a glorious and beneficent history in the past and fruitful civilising national activity in the present—such as Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and the Scandinavian countries—were threatened with absorption or domination by the powerful Teutonic Empire on the ground of its justifiable expansion and its economic and intellectual superiority. When finally, by a flagrant and cynically admitted breach of international treaties and obligations, Belgium was overrun by the German army with the ensuing orgies of cruelties and atrocities, the moral and the political consciousness of the whole civilised world and, more directly, of the British Empire and the British nation, was stirred to single-minded protest and active conflict against this flagrant breach of political justice and morality. The result has been that the principle of the defence of the smaller nationalities has, especially in the consciousness of the British people, been pushed to the very forefront of the causes and the aims of this war, and might thus claim to be its central and ultimate cause and object.

PAN-GERMAN WORLD DOMINION AND PRUSSIAN MILITARISM

When thus, through the logic of events and of thought, it became clearly established that the really efficient cause of this great world war was to be found in the desire for the expansion of German World Empire, most clearly and unequivocally set forth by the programmes of the All-Deutsche Partei, systematically developed in all its aspects and phases with a methodicity characteristic of this highly intellectual...