LORD BRYCE ON WHAT HISTORY WILL ASK

New Zealand Tablet, 26 November 1914, Page 35

LORD BRYCE ON WHAT HISTORY WILL ASK

‘ THE FAITH OF TREATIES is THE only SOLID FOUNDATION ON WHICH A TEMPLE OF PEACE CAN RE BUILT UP.’

tt Viscount Bryce, till lately British Ambassador to the United btates, in a long article to the Daily Chronicle controverts the poisoned teaching of General Bernhardi. , . ' ll r is onl y vul gar minds,’ he says, ‘.that mistake bigness for greatness, for greatness is of the Soul, not of the Body. ’ ‘ln the judgment which history will hereafter pass upon the forty centuries of recorded progress towards .civilisation that now lie behind us, what are the tests it will apply to determine the true greatness ox a people ? ... * Not population, not territory, not wealth, not military jiower. ‘ Rather will history ask : ‘ What examples of lofty character and unselfish devotion to honor and duty has a people given ? ‘ What has it done to increase'the volume of knowledge ? What thoughts and what ideals of permanent value and unexhausted fertility has it bequeathed to mankind? ‘ What works has it produced in poetry, music, and the other arts to be an unfailing source of enjoyment to posterity ? .

Advance by Thinking. 1 The small peoples need not fear the application of such tests.

■ The world advances not, as the Bernhardi school suppose, only or even mainly by fighting. It advances mainly by thinking and by a process of reciprocal teaching and learning, by a continuous and unconscious co-operation of all its strongest and finest minds. ‘ Each race —Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, Teutonic, Iberian, Slavonic— has something to give, each something to learn : and when their blood is blent the mixed stock may combine the gifts of both. ‘ The most progressive races have been those who combined willingness to learn with a strength which enabled them to receive without loss to their own quality, retaining their primal vigor, but entering into the labors of others, as the Teutons who settled within the dominions of Rome profited by the lessons of the old civilisation. The Teachings of History. ‘What are the teachings of history—history to which General Bernhardi is loud of appealing '{ ‘ That war has been the constant- handmaid of tyranny and the source of more than half the miseries of man. ‘ That although some wars have been necessary and have given occasion for the display of splendid heroism—wars of defence against aggression, or to succour the oppressed-—most wars have been needless or unjust. ‘ That the mark of an advancing civilisation has been the substitution of friendship for hatred and of peaceful for warlike ideals. ‘ That small peoples have done and can do as much for the common good of humanity as largo peoples. ‘ That Treaties must be observed, for what are they but records of national faith solemnly pledged ? and what could bring mankind more surely and swiftly back to that reign of violence and terror from which it has been slowly rising for the last ten centuries than the destruction of trust in the plighted faith of nations ? ‘ No event 'has brought out that essential uhity which now exists in the -world so forcibly as this war has done, for no event has ever so affected every part of the world. Four. continents a,re involved The whole of the Old World—and the New World suffers grievously in its trade, industry, and finance. Thus the

whole , world is interested in preventing the recurrence of such a calamity. • The Only Solid Foundation. . . We are told that armaments must be reduced, that the baleful spirit of militarism must be quenched, that the peoples must everywhere be admitted to a fuller share in the control of foreign policy, that efforts must be made- to establish a sort of League of Concord - some system of international relations and reciprocal j)eace , alliances by which the weaker nations may be protected, and under which differences between nations may be adjusted by - courts of arbitration and conciliation of wider scope than those that now exist. ‘ All these things are desirable. But no scheme for preventing future wars will have any chance of success unless it rests upon the assurance that the States which enter into it will loyally and steadfastly abide by it, and that each and all of them .will join in coercing by their overwhelming united strength any State which may disregard the obligations it has undertaken. ‘ The faith of treaties is the only solid foundation on which a Temple of Peace cun he built up.’ The State or Humanity. Lord Bryce vigorously combats the German idea that the State is greater than Humanity. ‘ The most startling of Bernhardi’s doctrines/ he says, ‘ are (1) the denial that there are any duties owed by the Stale to Humanity, except that of imposing its own superior civilisation upon as large a part of humanity, as possible, and (2) the denial of the duty of observing treaties. Treaties are only so much paper. ‘ To modern German writers the State is a much more tremendous entity than it is to Englishmen or Americans. It is a supreme power with a sort of mystic sanctity, a power conceived of, as it were, self-created, a force altogether distinct from, and superior to, the persons who compose it. ‘ But a ate is, after all, only so many individuals organised under a Government. It is no wiser, no more righteous, than the human beings of whom it consists, and whom it sets up to govern it. , Has the State No Morality? ‘ Has the State , then, no morality, no responsibility ? ‘ Is there no such thing as a common humanity ? Are there no duties owed to it ? Is there none of that “decent respect to the opinion of mankind” which the framers of the Declaration of Independence recognised ; no sense that even the greatest States are amenable to the sentiment of the civilised world ? ‘The small States, whose absorption is now threatened, have been po.ent and usefulperhaps the most potent and usefulfactors in the advance of civilisation. It is in them and by them that most of what is most precious in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in science, and in art has been produced. ‘ The first great though!. that brought man into a true relation with God came from a tiny people, inhabiting a country smaller than Denmark. The religions of mighty Babylon and populous Egypt have vanished: the religion of Israel remains in its earlier as well as in that later form which has overspread the world. ‘ The Greeks were small people, not united in one great State, but scattered over coasts and among hills in petty city communities, each with its own life, slender in numbers, but eager, versatile, intense. They gave us the richest, the most varied, and the most stimulating of fill literatures. What We Owe to Small Peoples. ' ‘ In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom 600 years ago, and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European Continent? And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy

‘So the small’ Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of science, from. Linnaeus downwards, poets like Tegner ,and Bjornson, scholars like Madvig, dauntless explorers like Fridthiof Nansen. England had, in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton, a population little larger than that of Bulgaria to-day.. The United States, in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall, counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece.’ * - ,