THE PRACTICAL OUTCOME

How far the foregoing is a correct description of the scope and character of the book under review may be gathered from the following statement of fact. My pamphlet does *not* attack the sentiment of patriotism (unless a criticism of the duellist's conception of dignity be considered as such); it simply does not deal with it, as being outside the limits of the main thesis. I do *not* hold, and there is not one line to which your reviewer can point as justifying such a conclusion, that Englishmen would be equally happy if they were under German rule. I do not conclude that it is irrational to take measures for perpetuating the existing European order. I do *not* "expose the folly of self-defence in nations." I do *not* object to spending money on armaments at this juncture. On the contrary, I am particularly emphatic in declaring that while the present philosophy is what it is, we are bound to maintain our relative position with other Powers. I admit that so long as there is danger, as I believe there is, from German aggression, we must arm. I do *not* preach a burglar's gospel, that *meum* and *tuum* are the same thing, and the whole tendency of my book is the exact reverse: it is to show that the burglar's gospel—which is the gospel of statecraft as it now stands—is no longer possible among nations, and that the difference between *meum* and *tuum* must necessarily, as society gains in complication, be given a stricter observance than it has ever heretofore been given in history. I do *not* urge that sentiment should be banished from politics, if by sentiment is meant the common morality that guides us in our treatment of marriage and of private property. The whole tone of my book is to urge with all possible emphasis the exact reverse of such a doctrine; to urge that the morality which has been by our necessities developed in the society of individuals must also be applied to the society of nations as that society becomes by virtue of our development more interdependent. I have only taken a small portion of your reviewer's article (which runs to a whole page), and I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that nearly all of it is as untrue and as much a distortion of what I really say as the passage from which I have quoted. What I do attempt to make plain is that the necessity for defence measures (which I completely recognize and emphatically counsel) implies on the part of someone a motive for aggression, and that the motive arises from the (at present) universal belief in the social and economic advantages accruing from successful conquest. I challenged this universal axiom of statecraft and attempted to show that the mechanical development of the last thirty or forty years, especially in the means of communication, had given rise to certain economic phenomena—of which re-acting bourses and the financial interdependence of the great economic centres of the world are perhaps the most characteristic—which render modern wealth and trade intangible in the sense that they cannot be seized or interfered with to the advantage of a military aggressor, the moral being, not that self-defence is out of date, but that aggression is, and that when aggression ceases, self-defence will be no longer necessary. I urged, therefore, that in these little-recognized truths might possibly be found a way out of the armament *impasse*; that if the accepted motive for aggression could be shown to have no solid basis, the tension in Europe would be immensely relieved, and the risk of attack become immeasurably less by reason of the slackening of the motive for aggression. I asked whether this series of economic facts—so little realized by the average politician in Europe, and yet so familiar to at least a few of the ablest financiers—did not go far to change the axioms of statecraft, and I urged re-consideration of such in the light of these facts. Your reviewer, instead of dealing with the questions thus raised, accuses me of "attacking patriotism," of arguing that "Englishmen would be equally happy under German rule," and much nonsense of the same sort, for which there is not a shadow of justification. Is this serious criticism? Is it worthy of the *Spectator*?