The Unity of Civilization

In face of the greatest tragedy in history, it is to history that we make appeal. What does it teach us to expect as the issue of the conflict? How far and in what form may we anticipate that the unity of mankind, centring as it must round Europe, will emerge from the trial?

Only two occasions occur to the mind on which, since the break up of the Roman Empire, a schism so serious as the present has threatened the unity of the Western world. The first was the Reformation and the war which it entailed down to the Peace of Westphalia. The second was the struggle against Napoleon, terminated a hundred years ago. The latter was in many respects a closer parallel. It was a struggle of the independent nations of Europe against the overweening ambition and aggression of one Power. It united them in an alliance which achieved its purpose and survived the successful issue of the war for some years. Some such course, with a comity of nations far wider and more enduring than the Holy Alliance as its sequel, we hope and predict for the present war.

The struggle at the Reformation was less like the present, either in its causes or its course, but it has some features which make it a useful point for a survey of the permanent unifying elements which hold and will hold the West together in spite of occasional cataclysms and the clash of rival interests and passion. A man like Erasmus, trembling before the catastrophe, willing to make immense sacrifices to avoid an open breach, uncertain of any final readjustment which might restore the harmony of the world, was not unlike some among us who hoped against hope that the enemy might be appeased, who thought that almost any peace was better than any war, who still fear that the breach in unity is vital or irreparable for generations.

And the issue three hundred years ago may also inspire us with a cautious optimism, a strong though not unmeasured trust. The right cause triumphed, fully in the end. Freedom was secured, both for churches and for individuals, throughout the world. The evil features in the papal system, against which the attack was really levelled, quietly but completely disappeared, and the institution survived, itself reformed. Before a hundred years were out the world had moved on to the conquest of new vantage points and the establishment of a wider unity on a firmer base.

Both previous occasions are therefore full of hope. The European system is, as we shall see throughout these essays, the necessary nucleus of any civilized order embracing the whole world; and the great convulsions which have hitherto continued to occur in it from time to time are moments of especial value for the study of the conditions under which it exists. They are the pathological experiences which reveal the strength and the weaknesses of the normal functions. We strive and hope for a more lasting state of general health, and do not despair of the patient even in this grave attack. He has survived even more serious illness. For though the present war is the most gigantic that the world has ever seen, its very greatness is the result of some of those modern developments-scientific skill, improved communications, national cohesion-on which ultimately the better organization of the whole commonwealth of nations will be built. Passi graviora; we have weathered the storms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the old Roman order and its sequel in the Catholic Church were at their weakest and the recuperative power of science and social reform and nationalism had hardly begun its work. We shall not fail with our greater forces of the present to regain and create a Europe freer, stronger, and more united than that which now seems to be shaken to the depths.

The process of gaining a greater unity among the leading nations of the world, like all the aspects of human evolution, must be regarded from two points of view, distinct in theory, inextricable in life. What does the nature of man itself demand? How has this nature expressed itself, and been affected in history by the external conditions, the geography, climate, conflict and commingling of races, which the theatre of its appearance has imposed?

Looked at in itself, so far as we can isolate it from its surroundings, man's nature is distinguished from that of lower animals by two features, both of them essentially social and tending to unity. He is more deeply and permanently attached to members of his own species, by affection, sympathy, veneration, tradition, than any other creature. And he is a reasoning being, reason itself requiring the contact and agreement of various minds. The incomparably greater force which he has acquired in the world, over all other species and over nature itself, is due to the working of these two factors. At starting he was physically less strong than many other creatures, and if he fought with others of his own kind, other animal species did the same. He was ahead of them by his reason, and reason acted, and must act, through the concert of thinking beings. This concert is not merely, or even mainly, an attachment among those living at the same time to co-operate for some common end; it is with man a conscious sequence of one generation on another. Sometimes the movement of adaptation is slower, sometimes quicker, but in every case the living are carrying on the work of the dead, and their co-operation in time as well as space is due to the working of the same qualities of attachment and reason, the social factors, by which at any moment a community of men is bound together.

Still looking at the matter a priori, it is clear that the vast community of mankind, though it has come more closely in contact in recent years over all the planet, yet acts, and must act, habitually and momentarily, through many smaller aggregates. Of these the leading types are the family and the country or nation. The former is not directly relevant to our inquiry, the latter plays a leading part in it. The former is less dependent on external conditions of land-formation and the like, and is in consequence more universal, more purely human. The latter has been shaped by geographical conditions, by racial qualities, by the apparent accidents of history. Its relation to the larger units of human society raises the most difficult, fundamental and unavoidable questions. To curb aggressive nationalism is the root-problem of the present war. To reconcile permanently nationalism with humanity would be to establish the everlasting peace.

Western society, indeed the whole community of mankind, is built up of these smaller units, the family and the nation, with their various intermediate groupings, but the historical process has by no means conformed at all exactly to this logical order. Society has not been made in orderly fashion by forming families and then combining families to make hundreds, and hundreds to make counties, and counties nations, and so on to the whole. A German god might have done this, but the way of nature and history was less perfect. The minor forms of human association have been taking shape, being altered and on the whole improved, throughout the process. At one point, of high importance for our argument, a larger form of association was achieved before the necessary constituent elements were articulated. This was the Greco-Roman world encircling the Mediterranean and completed in the Roman Empire of the second century A.D. It was the nucleus from which the Western world of modern civilization has been developed; yet it was there, settled in its main outlines, before the national units which it required for internal harmony and cohesion had taken any definite shape. It is to the difficulties of their growth and mutual adjustment that we owe most of the conflicts of modern history.

We shall in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage of pre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with superhuman insight and prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilization would pursue. All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, a culture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by a similarity which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widely severed by distance and climatic conditions. The raw material of the human product in science, art, and invention was alike in texture although often exuberant in detail and imagination. But it had not yet the unity of an organic whole, knit by a common purpose and conscious of itself.

To gain the cohesion of large numbers of men by whom wealth could be created and sufficient leisure and independence secured for an intellectual life, not dictated by the necessities of existence, a special concurrence of favourable physical conditions was required. The rich and secluded river-basins of many parts of the world provided this, and in consequence we find similar large communities arising at the end of the Stone Age in such places as China, Peru, Mexico, and above all in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The last named derived their special importance for the sequel from their proximity to the Mediterranean, which was to act as the great meeting-place and training-school for adventurous spirits and inquiring minds. From the busy intercourse of these land-locked waters arose the civilization called Minoan, or Aegean, centring in Crete, itself to be surpassed by the trading activity of the Phoenicians and the art and science of the Greeks.

It is with the advent of the Greek that the seal is placed upon the claim of the Mediterranean to be the birthplace of the highest type of human civilization, the centre from which a unity of the spirit was to spread, until, by material force as well as by the conquering mind, the European or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race. The supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions, as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the city-state. For our present purpose the first and the last are the most important and the first the most important of all.

The city-state was important as the first example of a free, self-governing community in which the individual realized his powers by living-and dying-with and for his fellows. This new type of human community was of the highest moment in the sequel. In many points it was a model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movement of the Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers, especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest and some of the deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. But it never acquired the permanence of the political units needed to build up the European Commonwealth. For this nations were required, and the Greeks were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked the size, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on which a modern nation rests.

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all in their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental and lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind. When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established, which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greek unification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted a corresponding work of organization in the human world which lay nearest to him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts were of priceless value and continuing effect, but both were, from the conditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant but precocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first on the material accumulated by generations of Chaldean and Egyptian priests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexact observations of geometry and astronomy the elements of unity in diversity which constitute science. Inquiring for causes, comparing and correcting individual facts, he arrived at the first equations in mathematics, the first laws of nature. His work in this sphere and in that of medicine went on continuously until after the Roman occupation of the Mediterranean world was complete. It died out gradually in the theological atmosphere of Alexandria, and on the purely human side ended in Stoicism with an amalgam of universal philosophy and Roman law. The Stoic Empire of the second century A.D. was the high-water mark of the joint efforts of Greeks and Romans to attain unity and humanism in thought and practice. Its brilliance while it lasted the nobility of its leading men, the persistence of the main lines of its structure, are the measure of our debt to the builders of the Greco-Roman world.

The Roman contribution to the result which in the end so perfectly combined both movements was, in its origin and nature, singularly unlike the Greek. The Roman did not analyse his conceptions. He accepted what came to him, either from his ancestors or from other peoples, without scrutiny, except so far as to see that new matter could be worked into old forms without a dislocation in practice. He was the pragmatist, the Greek the idealist. This instinct of adaptation and sequence made the Roman the pioneer in law as the Greek was the pioneer in science. It rendered possible the holding together in one political system of the multifarious territories and peoples from the Tigris to the Solway Firth for long enough to enable the greater part of that area to be permanently civilized on Roman lines. But, like the artist's sketch of his picture, the whole was outlined before the parts were worked out in their final form; and the sketch itself was seriously imperfect in more than one point. The set-back which Augustus received on the eastern side of the Rhine was never made good, and the Germanic tribes therefore remained un-Romanized until the Church in the seventh and eighth centuries resumed the work on other lines. This defeat of Varus and the legend of Hermann became to the German a symbol of national greatness in a sense which none of the other national conflicts with Rome ever assumed. To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude and pleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman occupation. To us the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret that we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taught us. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer the Empire which had founded the unity of Europe. It was a German Empire, and though the ancient world fired his imagination, he always saw it through German eyes.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the framework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral and civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Roman missionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than the Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest. Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the Pope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants. The moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to sides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, was nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thus lifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and military nation of the West.

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievement of the Middle Ages. Rome had given the framework of a great system, and into this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks, Huns, Moors, Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks when they swept down to the Aegean. They came as migrant hordes, and in the area civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down as nations, mingling with the earlier population and divided up by the geographical configurations of the Continent. Among them France and England had the advantage. They gained their unity as nations earlier than any other countries of the West-England in a form which has lasted substantially unaltered for six hundred years. Spain, which had been torn asunder by the Moors, was not consolidated fully till the end of the fifteenth century, in time to send the last of the crusaders under Columbus in quest of fresh worlds to conquer across the Atlantic. But Italy and Germany-and especially the latter-remained disintegrated until our own time. Both gained their union about the same time, fifty years ago, but by different methods and in a different spirit. Italy, naturally a compact geographical unit, was welded by a democratic enthusiasm, of which Cavour and Mazzini were the soul and Garibaldi the right arm. Germany, vast in power and numbers, lay strongly entrenched in the central area of the Continent, but failed to kindle into national life at the same democratic moment. She was fashioned into political existence by a Thor's hammer, which, as it rose and fell, dealt shattering blows on friends as well as foes, in Austria as well as France, on Danes and Poles, on Liberals and Socialists, on little kings and great ecclesiastics. And now this Frankenstein creation among states offers the most serious problem in adjusting national claims with European unity. We have to check and to assimilate-if the world is to live as one-the one Power which has hitherto developed most persistently and successfully its own resources, but least in subordination to the interests of the whole.

There are those who would regard all national barriers and organization as somewhat of an obstruction, who would prefer a simple internationalism to the world as we know it, with its pent-up passions and attachments, its constant liability to explosion, its slow progress by tortuous channels towards the larger view and the surer hold. Many reformers, from Plato downwards, have taken up a similar attitude in regard to the smaller institution, the family, which is often found to be an obstruction in the way of short cuts to social utopias at home. Kant's ideal of a cosmopolitan constitution as the goal of all human effort rather leans to this side of the balance. But a due balance must be kept and the full value both of family and nation maintained against theories or tendencies which would roll us all out into cosmopolitan items. A glance at other elements which go to make up the unity of European society will tend to correct the perspective.

The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. It lasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity which supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured for a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching and pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full force over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual fabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of cognate and derivative institutions which have served the cause of unity in the moral and intellectual sphere. We shall speak later of the more perfect and lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages and the Renascence tended to the same end, using a material in philosophy and theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of knowledge and the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing a more complete community of scholars than has perhaps been ever witnessed in Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine love of truth, or even of honest disputation, was independent of differences of race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from Oxford to Paris, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sit at the feet of some world-famous teacher.

And the wandering scholar was by no means the only social link. Many of the trade-routes surprise us by the length and adventurousness of their course. Amber from the Baltic found its way to the south of Italy and Spain, while small boats from Ireland were brought into the mouths of the Loire and the Garonne when the coasts of the Channel were impassable through barbarians from the North.

Mediaeval Europe was, in fact, much more of a unity than the modern traveller would expect, and this was mainly due to the influence of the Church. The spiritual unity went deep on one side of man's nature, and when a man like Erasmus surveyed the prospect at the beginning of the sixteenth century we can well understand his horror, and his determined abstention from any step which would precipitate the break-up of the one organized body which represents the old united culture of Christendom and might check the new forces which were threatening selfishness and disorder in ever-widening circles on the globe. For it must be noted that new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the unity of the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers were extending, East and West, the sphere in which the European was to impose his influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenth century thus becomes one, perhaps the most critical, of all the turning-points in the history of the West. Danger was mixed with hope, disorder with new knowledge and fresh power, and the crisis has not yet been surmounted. But we have gained by now some insight into the nature of the new forces and see that they should, and one day will, work more fully in the direction of unity in the civilized world, of healthy independence in the parts and a growing harmony in the whole. Little of this could have been seen by the observer at the outbreak of the Reformation.

Nationalism, democracy, colonial expansion, religious change, the growth of knowledge and its application to industry and social reform, these are the salient features which distinguish our modern from the mediaeval world, and we have to consider how far they make for the unity of mankind.

The sixteenth century saw both the strengthening of national governments and the beginning of European colonization. England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, all settled down under a central government stronger and more independent than they had previously enjoyed, and pegged out estates for themselves beyond the seas. In each case wars have been entailed in the process, and, as we know, the backwardness of Germany at this period has been visited upon the rest of Europe tenfold in recent times. National expansion thus appears to be an eminent provocation of international strife. It is with no intention either of ignoring facts or minimizing dangers that one turns here to the other side of the account. Where was the spark actually fired which led to the present conflagration? In that part of Europe where the national units were least stable and developed, where the conditions of government and social order are most remote from our own. Who can doubt that if in the Balkans the Turks had been able to establish even the sort of government we maintain in India, or if, still better, the Balkan States, apart from the Turks, had gained their own independence in a federation like the Swiss, the aggression of the Central Powers would have been checked? The compact, well-established national unit is not in itself a danger, but there is a danger in weak, oppressed, or disjointed nationalities, who have not found safety and offer a bait to their expansive neighbours.

Thus strong and independent nations, as Kant postulates in his Perpetual Peace, are guarantees of peace, stones in the Temple of Humanity. Another consideration not generally recognized, strengthens this conclusion. In recent years all leading and progressive nations have been devoting their first thought to social reform. This has been conspicuously the case with ourselves, with the French, with the United States, with the smaller, more advanced countries in Europe. Germany, too, though her first energies have been given to organizing war, has had in this matter two distinct souls. Her social democrats and part of her governing class have been consistent and successful in working for the amelioration of the condition of the people, and have often anticipated other nations in her process. It is self-evident, first, that a strong national government is needed to carry out wide social reform, second, that in proportion as governments devote themselves whole-heartedly to this, their energies are less likely to be devoted to molesting their neighbours. Germany, unfortunately for herself and the world, had no government which could speak for the whole people and be responsible to it. A truly national government in Germany, or anywhere else, would not have willed this war.

The colonial expansion which was connected with the outburst of national sentiment in the sixteenth century, and has led to frequent conflicts between European nations ever since, also appears in a different light if we study it in view of facts not dreamt of in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Americas, which appeared to the early navigators as rich estates to be cultivated for the benefit of proprietors at home, have developed into powerful and independent countries, eminently pacific (except for internal brawls), looking forward to producing new types of life and government, hoping perhaps to hold the balance in a long-drawn contest of the Old World Powers. The circle, therefore, of the Mediterranean world which was enlarged by the discoveries of the sixteenth century, finds its completion to-day in new states across the Atlantic, which are on the whole enormously preponderant on the side of peace, and wish to hold their own in Western civilization by force of wealth and industry, and not by arms. To us, too, it is clear, and will be one day to the Germanic Powers, that the British Empire, the largest political aggregate on the globe, is essentially a league of free peoples, under no compulsion from the centre, but responsive to attack upon their power or liberty by any third party, strong from their general contentment with the conditions and institutions of their life, and not through any systematic regulations imposed from above. Even India and other protected states and dominions, though not yet self-governing, are moving steadily in the direction of responsibility and of willing association with the British Empire or Commonwealth as a whole.

Such is the much vaster community of nations which has succeeded to the Western Europe of the sixteenth century; and no mention has been made of the place of Russia or the countries still further east. The picture does not suggest a welter of conflicting passions and ambition throughout the world. On the whole a mass of men and women labouring with fair contentment at their daily task, not concerned that their state or nation should extend its boundaries, least of all that it should provoke attack; little conscious of the historic debt of nations to one another, but wishing well to others except when they cross the path of a personal desire; gaining rapidly more sense of actual community among living men, but hardly realizing yet how man's power has been built up in the past and how infinitely it might be advanced and the world improved by harmony and steadily directed efforts in the future. That the sense of brotherhood has gained ground in the world, especially since the middle of the eighteenth century, is certain. Voices of protest reach us even from Germany through the storm of hatred. But the vague sympathy, the desire for peace and shrinking from the horrors of war need to be enlightened, to have a reasoned basis in the belief that all nations, and especially those of the vanguard, are partners in a common work and essential one to another, above all, perhaps, to have institutions which tend to co-operation and make a sudden and disastrous breach as difficult as possible. Many of these instruments of peace were being forged when the war broke out. Many of the most profound ties between nations are not understood or are kept in the background by nationalist teachers or a nationalist press.

Of all the modern steps towards international unity, the most indisputable, the most firmly based and furthest-reaching, is science, and the various applications of science, both in promoting intercourse between different parts of the world and in alleviating suffering and strengthening and illuminating human life. The more prominence, therefore, that we can secure for the growth of science in the teaching of history, the larger place humanity, or the united mind of mankind, will take in the moving picture which every one of us has, more or less full and distinct, of the progress of the world. For some hundreds of years, culminating in the three or four centuries A.D., the dominant feature in the picture was of a triumphant city-state, Rome, gradually subduing and embracing the world. Then for some thousand years the picture was of a religious organization leading the civilized world, and nationalities were only emerging as somewhat dim and ill-defined figures. Then, with the rupture in the Church and the upspringing of other religious bodies and forms of thought, national figures become predominant in the scene, and attract nearly all the attention, which is given, except by a few curious persons, to the study of history. Nationalism, once in defect in Western Europe, has been for some time in excess. The remedy is not directly to attack it, except in the case in which it gave us no choice, but to supply the limiting and controlling ideas. Of all these, science fits the case most exactly, because, as science, it can know no distinction between French or German, English or Russian. There is no French physics or German chemistry, and if we are told that the Prussians have their own theory of anthropology, based on the predominance of a particular type of skull which other anthropologists dispute, we are quite sure that in that case science has not yet said her last word.

We put physical science first because it contains the largest number of certain and accepted laws. The further we get from mathematical exactness the more liable we are to differences of opinion, which may, as in the case of anthropology, cluster round some question of national pique. But it would be easy to trace through all the sciences, and into philosophy and religion, a growing unity of method and result before which national differences often resolve themselves into a difference of style. The style is the nation's, but the truth is mankind's.

We could not, indeed, be sure that if every one in Western Europe were a trained scientist, wars would cease from the earth: certain professors have taught us too well for that. But in so far as men come to recognize that the great body of organized knowledge is a common possession, due to the united efforts of different nations, and that it can only be increased by joint action and may be increased to such a point that the whole of life is a happier and nobler thing, so far they will be averse to war. And in its various applications, to increasing production and quickening communication, to lengthening life and healing sickness, to protecting workers and cheapening food, men see the natural fruits of an activity whose basis is common thought and its ultimate purpose the common good.

It has been said with truth that it is easier to trace the growth of science as a joint product of co-operating minds, than to find a growth of common sentiments among the men and the nations who have created it. True among individuals, it must be at least as true among groups and nations. We may work successfully with some one at a problem or learn from a teacher or a companion when we dislike him personally and do not seek his society apart from the needs of our common work. It has often happened, and will happen again in private and public. But though particular antipathies may increase, the tendency to dislike others is a diminishing quality among civilized men. In the long run common sense and necessity will prevail. We are born to live a while before we die; and we must live on the same planet, sometimes next door to those who have sworn a never-dying hate.

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