MR. BRIGHT ON THE BLESSEDNESS OF COMMERCIAL INTERCOURSE.
MR. BRIGHT'S speech at the Institution of Civil Engineers, on Saturday, in Kensington Town Hall, evinced a strange sort of unreasoned, not to say almost superstitions, con- viction, that under all kinds of circumstances, the more inter- course you can promote between one nation and another, the more friendly, and the more likely to profit by their friendship, those nations will become. Mr. Bright's object, apparently, was to pursnade his hearers that if the Channel Tunnel could be made to answer commercially,— on which he offered no opinion,—it could not but answer morally. The mercantile profit of the transaction might be a dubious question, and without that necessary condition Mr. Bright did not appear willing to answer for the moral advan- tage of the enterprise. But, granted its mercantile success, he seems to think that the moral consequences of the under- taking are not within the limits of discussion. " Anything which will bring the people of the Continent into cordial relations with the people of this country," says Mr. Bright, rather naively, "will be much more likely to preserve peace, than any of those strange notions that peace is to be preserved by our being kept separate from them." Now, if the relations established are to be always and uniformly " cordial," cadit qucestio,—Mr. Bright need not tell us that the more cordial we become, the less we shall be likely to quarrel. That is not only a true, but an identical proposition. Bat supposing Mr. Bright were asked whether it must necessarily be an advantage to the cordial friendship of two neighbours to have a door opened between their houses, so as to obviate the necessity of going round by the front entrance, would he answer in the affirmative without the smallest hesitation, and without having the least regard to the character of the friendship between them, or of the misunderstandings to which they had been liable P Has it never occurred to him that there are cases in which the promotion of too great intimacy between neighbours has resulted not in closer friendship, but in an abrupt termina- tion of friendship Surely, nothing is more obvious than that a certain separation, even a positive distance between friends, may be a security for the duration of the friendship, in- stead of an obstacle in the way of it. We are quite ready to admit to Mr. Bright that a physical separation is far from being a security for peace. The moats round the feudal castles no more kept their owners at peace with each other, than the moat round England kept England at peace with France. But almost for the same reason for which it is true that isolation does not mean peace, it is still more true that the removal of isolation does not mean peace. Isola- tion does not mean peace where there is the disposition to quarrel, because the disposition to quarrel is active enough to overleap small obstacles. But once grant the smallest disposi- tion to quarrel, and then open and active communication, so far from ensuring peace, will undoubtedly facilitate strife. Mr. Bright will say that the more people there are who are friendly to France in England, and the more people there are who are friendly to England in France, the less fear of war there must be. Perhaps so, so far as these people are concerned. But then, again, the more close and delicate are the relations between any two countries, the more mischief a few evil-disposed persons can do, which the many well-disposed persons can never undo. Nothing is more misleading than to assume that the multi- plication of intercourse operates only to draw people closer together. Why have we quarrelled so much more with France than with Germany ? Why, simply because we have been in much closer communication with France than with Germany. Why has France quarrelled much more with Germany than we have quarrelled with Germany ? Simply because France has been in much closer communication with Germany than we have been. Which of the European peoples has been at war with the United States except ourselves ? And why have we alone been at war with them ? Simply because the people of the Anglo-American Colorties,—subsequently the people of the United States,—and the people of England had mach closer relations with each other than the people of the Continent had with them. Was there ever a war between any European people and the people of the American continent as severe and protracted as the Civil War of 1861-5 between the Northern and Southern States P Yet there was absolute Free-trade and free intercourse of every conceivable kind between these Northern and Southern States, and it was precisely in consequence of that close and free intercourse, that the deep-rooted divergence between the genius of the two peoples and of their institutions resulted in so fierce a strife. It is absolutely the reverse of true that the closeness of the relations established between two States is the measure of security against war. Judging by history, it would be much nearer the truth to speak of this closeness of relations as the measure, of the danger of war. Until the point has been reached at which two peoples are really fused into one, close- ness of intercourse, far from averting the danger of con- flict, greatly enhances it. It is quite true, as Mr. Bright says, that there has been less quarrelling between France and England since there were constant steam-packets plying between the two countries than there was before. And that no doubt, may have been partly due to that general increase of mutual respect between the two nations which has resulted from the multiplication of newspapers and other means of knowledge, as well as from the personal knowledge gained by direct travelling. But it has been in a very much larger degree due to that rapid development of French military power, and of English naval power, which has secured the strength of the two countries from any possibility of col- lision, the kind of strength peculiar to the insular power being precisely that which could best secure us against the pressure of military strength. It is needless to remark that any change whieh tended to do away with the separating line between the two kinds of power, would tend also to do away with the security against a collision. Anything which enabled the swordfish to fight in the jungle, or the tiger to fight in the sea, would certainly increase the prospect of battles between the swordfish and the tiger. And so anything which made England accessible by land, would increase the prospect of collisions, and still more the fear of collisions, between England and France. Yet we do not mean to imply
for a moment that the multiplication of means of communi- cation is only another name for the multiplication of the • chances of quarrel. Of course, it implies also the Multiplication of an indefinite number of friendly relations for every unfriendly • relation which might arise. Unfortunately, however, the dangers ' which close intercourse involves from those who desire war, are very much greater indeed than the securities for peace which are given by the same closeness of intercourse on the part of the friends of peace. The power of an assassin to cast a shell of dynamite into London streets, is not neutralised by the power of a thousand lovers of peace to denounce and punish him. The dangers of intimacy are aggravated by the existence of one • traitor in a degree indefinitely greater than that in which the safeguards are multiplied by the existence of ten thonsand cordial friends.
Mr. Bright indulges in a rapture which is intelligible enough, though a little common-place, on the rapidity and safety of his railway journeys from London to Rochdale. We are by no means insensible to the wonders of the new traffic', which has, doubtless, so changed the surface of this island since the accession of William IV., that it is difficult for us to realise the England of 1820, and would be difficult for those who died before the new era to realise the England of to-day.
what puzzles us is this,—that Mr. Bright, with his great imagination, his strong poetical insight into the life that underlies the external world, should regard all this trans- formation with a sort of religions awe, as if it introduced nothing but blessedness into the world, and should apparently not be in the least sensible of the manifold moral dangers which all this rapid change, and rapid stimulus to the love of change, has brought us, along with the rich stream of material blessings. The ancient notion of a traveller was decidedly unfavourable to travelling. It used to be held in the old Greek world that commerce, so far as it involved travel, was the most dangerous and unsettling of pursuits, since it removed a man from the steady pressure of one kind of national convic- tion, while it did not subject him long enough to any other kind, to give him an equivalent for what he had lost. And in the ancient world, there was a great deal of truth in the pre- judice. No doubt, there was less fixed creed, less steadying conviction among the commercial peoples,—among the Phoe- nicians and the Greeks, for instance,—tha•n among any of the races which grew up under the same steady and con- stant influences. Doubtless, a time came in the history of the West when all this was changed, when prejudice had crystallised men into types much too hard and rigid, and when experience of different creeds, customs, and laws, was needful in order to give the requisite charity to human feelings. But even in our own age, the effect of easy and frequent change of place is by no means one of pure good. Indeed, we are in- clined to ascribe to the over-stimulus of frequent contact with new ideas, much of that breaking-away from all moral con- viction which marks so considerable a class in what we may call the more mobile-minded races of the modern world,—the Slave, the French, the Irish. The English, no doubt, with their heavily-built and slowly-moving character, probably take more good and less harm from the frequent and easy changes of modern life than any other race in the world. Yet even for the English, it is by no means true that the multiplication of the means of locomotion is pure blessing, or that we ought to look upon it, as Mr. Bright seems to look upon it, as almost sacramental,—as conveying through physical means a purely spiritual strength. It requires a very strong head to hold one's own in this moral whirligig of a world; and this strong head is not given to all Englishmen, much less to all members of the human race. That is no reason, we admit, why we eb.oahl forbid the utilisation by man of all physical discover* which he can turn clearly to his own use. But it is a reason why we are not bound to regard the convenience of common* as the final and authoritative consideration by which to test the desirability of any change which must have great poli- tical and social, as well as great commercial consequences. It is clear enough that it would be immensely for the convenience of commerce that the various nations of the earth should all use a single language. But would any statesman in his senses propose, on that account, to begin the effort to substitute a universal language for the language spoken by any one people ? It seems to us childish in Mr. Bright to assume that the decisive question in relation to the Channel Tunnel is its mechanical possibility and its commercial remunerativeness. It might be
bath mechanically possible and also sure of the very highest commercial success, and yet be as undesirable,—if it is to promote Stock-Exchange panics, and to put all our military advisers on the fidget for generations to come,—as it would be, for instance, to propose to the French Government to exchange Dover for Calais, in order that each of the two Governments might be identified with the safety and welfare of a bit of territory belonging to the other Government. There is no manner of absolute religious duty obliging us to extend the commerce of the world, if there be anything to set oft' against that extension which concerns the world at least as vitally as commercial enterprise itself. No doubt, there should be a very good reason for refusing to do what would render our intercourse with other men easier and cheaper. But we all recognise in our individual daily life that such reasons do exist, and are often very weighty ones; and there may be,—and we think there are, just as good reasons for refusing to do what would render international intercourse somewhat easier and cheaper, as for refusing to do what would render family intercourse easier and cheaper. Over-exposure to each other's whims is by no means the best security for true friendship ; and it is the friendship of nations which is the true end to keep in view, not the mere multiplication of their opportunities of intercourse.
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