Norman Angell Talks to John Smith*
By SIR FREDERICK WHYTE
Tnits book is a guide for the plain man written by one who has as good a title as anyone now living to speak on the problem of " War and Peace." Twenty-seven years ago, Norman Angell told us in The Great Illusion that " no indem- nity commensurate with the cost of modern war will be paid by the vanquished in future, since, payable only ultimately in goods or services, too great a dislocation would be caused to the victor's own economic process by the attempt to receive them." The story of Reparations since 1919 proves the truth of these words written in 1908 and gives their author an, uncommon right to say " I told you so." He would be more than human if he had resisted the temptation to say it but, though he does remind his readers in 1935 of his twenty- seven-year-old prophecy, he is more concerned to persuade men to think clearly than to justify himself. The title of this latest volume from his active pen is well-chosen, for the world is only now beginning to write the first pages of the preface to Peace, and no one knows better than Sir Norman Angell that the obstacles which block the progress of a new international order lie not in institutions or in governments, but in the mind of the common man.
The purpose of this book, therefore, is to answer the ques- tions and objections raised by the ordinary man regarding the League of Nations, National Defence, Disarmament, Collective Responsibility and Internationalism, and to examine the multitude of perplexities which beset him as he reads his daily paper. Sir Norman Angell does this in his well-known Socratic manner. There is probably no man in public life who has asked so many provoking and suggestive questions, nor any who is so well-equipped to foil the heckler's guile. And here he faces each issue as it arises with dialectic skill and intellec- tual honesty which, in combination, make him a formidable pamphleteer. The honest doubter is met with a helpful and clarifying candour ; sentimentalists, whether of the militarist or of the pacifist type, are soundly douched with the cold water of reason ; and those who claim the rights of a panacea for any " ism " are mercilessly examined and usually stripped of their pretensions. Thus it will be seen that the author is impartial. He gives as short a shrift to those who profess to believe that " capitalism is the father of war " as to those whose international wisdom begins and ends with si viipacem, para bellum. For himself, he has no panacea except right thinking. Indeed, it might almost be said that the real motive of his argument is to show people how to think, rather than what to think. This reading of his plea, however, may suggest that on the fundamentals of international peace he is negative, which is very far from true. He is, in fact, emphatic and positive ; and he is most positive on one radical conception which needs to be firmly grasped before the public mind can understand the parent origin of war.
This tap-root of war is the prevailing conception of national sovereignty. The sovereign State is a political necessity for the domestic affairs of civilized mankind. Obviously, there must be a last resort in political action, and in the majority of well-developed States it is found in the rule of law, ex- pressing the general will and exercising final authority over all the citizens. Each nation in turn has created for itself this inevitable sovereignty. The lesson of its inevitability and its necessity was learned only by slow and often painful stages ; but, in the end, it .was learned, and men became
*Preface to Peace. By Sir Norman Angell. (Hamish Hamilton. 7s. 6d.) accustomed to bow before the authority to which they had yielded some part of their own individual freedom in order to equip it with the power to preserve society from disruption. But,"observe what happened when the sovereign State moved out of its sphere of unchallenged domestic authority into the field of international relations. In the latter it acted, and still acts, as if its sovereignty could still operate unchallenged. In practice, it confronts the rest of the world in a spirit which brooks no control or resistance, and recognizes no limit to its claims except that which is imposed by the limits of its own physical power in arms vis a Lis any opponent. This attitude inevitably spells conflict. It is the parent cause of all war and exercises upon the relations of all nations a sinister and fatal influence. Civilized man, having created the sovereign State in order to guarantee for himself life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in an ordered society, made the mistake of assuming that his State ought to possess the same un- challenged right of sovereignty in its relations with other States which it possessed over him and his fellows at home. This engendered not only conflict but anarchy. In the Great War, which, from the point of view of civilization, was a civil war between the members of the great family of humanity, the sovereign powers of the world clashed in strife as never before. They came near to destroying themselves ; and, as they looked down into the dizzy gulf of chaos, they saw in its depths the grave of human progress. This experi- ence in the War awakened in mankind a resolve to protect humanity in the future from the fate which so nearly overtook it ; and, id that moment of enlightenment, the League of Nations was born.
This is the essential thesis of Sir Norman Angell's book. It is cogently argued in Part II, but since he is too practical to leave it as merely a thesis, he puts it to the test for each individual reader by asking " John Smith " what he is going to do about it. Wisely insisting upon the responsibility of the private citizen, he reminds " John Smith," in words taken from Profesgr Trotter's Instincts of the Herd in Peace and liar, that
" the only way in which society can be made safe from disruption or decay is by the intervention of the conscious and instructed intellect as a factor among the forces ruling its development. . . . There is no responsibility for man's destiny anywhere outside his own responsibility and . . . there is no remedy for his ills outside his own efforts."
In thus "putting it up to John Smith," Sir Norman offers him help in a hundred puzzles and actually asks and answers something like a hundred concrete questions. Every sup- porter, canvasser and voter in the Peace Ballot ought to read and digest this Preface to Peace. Is it open to criticism ? Yes ! to a hundred criticisms ; but I sin not going to cavil at any occasional lapse, nor to censure a busy
pen for being, like Pascal in one of his longer letters, too prolix " because he hadn't time to make it shorter," when that pen has written a timely and pungent book ; which is just what it claims to be, a " Preface to Peace." It avoids all technical discussion of the various proposals for the Amend- ment of the Covenant, the promotion of security and the attainment of disarmament, and concentrates attention on the question why there is not greater public support for the vital principle underlying all of them. Being convinced that
the ordinary man, who wants to get rid of war, has never succeeded in clarifying his own thoughts about war and peace, l'orman Angell offers this book as an aid to clearer thinking.
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