THE SOUL OR THE STATE

To most readers Mr. Mousley is probably best knoidn as the author of those two excellent war-books, The Secrets of a Kuttite and Blow Bugles Blow. He is known as an imagina- tive and accurate writer, who left Cambridge for the front of war, and endured all the unspeakable miseries of the siege of

Kut, the hideous sufferings of the retreat to Bagdad, and the weariness of imprisonment under the Turks. But to others

he is known as a learned and acute student of Law, especially of International Law, as is seen in his work The Place of International Law in jurisprudence, and in his generous plea for the families ruined by bombardment in the War. It is called " A British Brief, England's Reparation Victims and

War Debt," and that such a plea should have been called for is a disgrace to any Government.

His present book is an exhaustive treatise in political philo- sophy, and its problem is to discover or define the relation- ship of Man's free spirit to the State and Law. For the State he adopts the name Leviathan, as used by Hobbes in his famous book (a model of seventeenth-century English prose)

called Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, published in London

in 1651. Borrowing from the Book of Job, Hobbes gave the name of the vast animal there described to the vast power of the State, and a few words from his definition, though familiar, may be repeated here for the better understanding of Mr. Mousley's book. Hobbes treats of one single State, but within that State all must confer their power and strength upon one Man or Assembly of men, and submit their Wills everyone to his Will and their judgements to his judgement ; " In such manner as if every man should say to every man, I authorise and give up my Right of Governing myself to this Man or to this Assembly of men on this condition that thou give up thy Right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner ": " This is the generation of that great Leviathan, or, rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defence."

This Leviathan is necessary in time of war, " where every man is enemy to every man," but also in time of peace : " For without him there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation—no knowledge of the face of the Earth, no account of Time; no Art, no Letters, no Society, and what is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

It is evident from these familiar extracts that the unqualified doctrine of Hobbes would justify the " totalitarian " systems of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. As a rule, Mr. Mousley appears to use the Leiviathan in that sense of total tyranny over the Individual, whose mind, as he says, becomes the subject of usurping Leviathan's special care, as in the following instance, for which it is not hard to find a parallel in modern Europe: " To deaden the individual mind, to deafen it except to one voice, to blindfold its eyes except to one sight, to stamp it into a pattern, and then, ignoring its separate existence, thenceforth to deal only with the patterned mass mind, is the totalitarian's Satanic method of wedding the nation to war, and of breeding only warriors. Swallowed up, Man, the master, becomes the spawn of his servant Leviathan! "

It is in that Hitierian or Satanic sense that the author generally uses the monster's name. But at times, especially as the treatise proceeds, he seems to imagine him as standing at the parting of two ways—one leading to War and the other to Law. Nearly all of us who are over forty have known by experience what war is—the early excitement, the welcome change from ordinary work, the first exhilaration of danger, and then the monotony of it all, the weariness, the absence of lovers and friends, the abominable filth, the pain of wounds,

the death of men close by, the stupidity of supposing that war settles any question. And those who have lived through the last twenty years have also known .what Mr. Mousley means by his chapter on " War in Peace "—a kind of war which has been raging since Versailles and is raging at this moment.

Most of us have a conception also of what Law means, though we may have had little experience of it. Law, says the author, is the only alternative to War, and we may imagine the Leviathan looking down the road to Law, though seldom choosing to follow it. War is his natural propensity. As his first creator said : " Before him darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear." Or if he is imagined in a tamer mood, still the ancient poet asks :" Will he make supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee?

Will he make a covenant with thee? " To which we can now answer : " Yes, he will, only that he may break it the sooner."

The fighting instinct in man is strong, Mr. Mousley admits, and whether he choose War or Law, Leviathan must be strong also, as Mr. Bertrand Russell showed in his recent book on Power, and as we are told that Leviathan or the State can

only be one, the whole of the State's power must go into him. Otherwise the State will fall to pieces, and then, in Hobbes's emphatic words, the life of man will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If we assume, as the author evidently thinks we generally may, that the Leviathan of the powerful State, urged on by Pride, Power, Ambition, or a false pretext of Justice (often set aside for " vital interests ") chooses the road to War, then there is perpetual contest : " On the one hand there is machine-man mentally enslaved by Leviathan into the conviction that there is no liberation any- where but in and through war. On the other hand, there stands man, the growing spirit, resolute and apart, trustfully awaiting leadership in the faith that the only liberation is from self effected by the self. And the contest will be decided by power."

If Leviathan, or Hitlerism, were to spread all over the world, as in fact Herr Hitler desires, there would be a kind of peace, but Man would be crushed, and, as we proceed in the book,

we find that Leviathan is " a whole-hearted liar." He is also called " the Anti-Christ which must be destroyed." Many have traced the " Totalitarian " State to Nietzsche, but how like Mr. Mousley's conception of Leviathan is Zarathustra's. where he writes : " The coldest of all cold monsters is called the State. Coldly it utters its lies, and this lie crawls from its mouth: ' I, the State, am the people.' " It is impossible here to trace the full argument of this remarkable and explicit book. It is not a work of vague theory, but is founded on the realities of recent history, of which it is very largely a careful and conclusive summary. The author insists strongly upon the spiritual side or deep religious instincts of Man. Indeed, his ideal of a Christian- Democratic State, for the appearance of which he allows at least two hundred years, must, he thinks, be established on the great sayings of Christ Himself, such as " Love thy neigh- bour as thyself " or " Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." This furtherance of Christianity as a possible guide for some future Leviathan recalls the famous answer of Lenin to Mr. Lansbury, "Go and convert the Christians! "

HENRY W. NEVINSON.